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It’s been a while since we’ve had any interesting news from Marriott Vacation Club and I’d started to assume that they were too busy selling Destination Club points, roping in new owners and creating new owner-tiers to bother doing anything that may be actually useful for existing owners.
The good news it that it seems they haven’t completely forgotten that they need to freshen up their offering every now and again.
The latest Marriott Vacation Club Insider Bulletin has the announcement that The Mayflower in Washington DC (an Autograph Collection hotel) will be available as an exchange option from 1 August 2015.
What’s especially important in this news release is the fact that all owners will be able to exchange into this property. it’s not restricted to Destination Club points users.
“Enrolled and Points Owners may request an exchange reservation through the Marriott Vacation Club Destinations Exchange Program, while Owners of Weeks may request exchange access through Interval International”
The property is a hotel and not a traditional Vacation Club property so owners won’t be exchanging into somewhere like Marriott’s Custom House in Boston but it’s still a nice addition to the program.
The rooms look to be nicely appointed….
The location looks fantastic…..(double-click to enlarge)
but I’m not sure how good availability will be.
What the Insider Bulletin doesn’t mention was that it looks like MVCI owners will only have access to a single floor of the hotel. Take a look at the way the hotel is presented on Marriott.com (double-click to enlarge):
Notice the subtle difference in the address – the Marriott Vacation Club option specifies the 7th floor.
The other strange thing about how the hotel is shown on Marriott.com is that the pricing differs between the hotel and the Vacation Club floor despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the room on offer (they have tweaked the names a bit but the underlying offing seems the same):
If you want to book the regular hotel this is what you see:
but if you’re not really paying attention and you elect to book the Vacation Club floor this is what you’re offered:
The dates and cancellation policies for both examples are the same. So watch out!
The hotel gets pretty good reviews on TripAdvisor although it doesn’t appear to stand out amongst the numerous other options in Washington:
As far as Interval International goes, the hotel doesn’t appear in the resort directory yet so there’s no way of seeing what availability is like – I’ll keep trying over the next few weeks and will post on here if I notice any change to this situation.
Overall it’s great to see Marriott adding options to their MVCI portfolio – it’s hard to complain when they give us an other destination to visit. Having said that, I’m going to reserve judgement on just how good this news is until I see how easy it is to actually exchange into the 7th floor of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC.
