Wyndham have announced that you’ll be able to redeem your Wyndham Reward points for condos, homes and timeshares. To start with 17,000 new properties have been added to the system, when they first the integration in late 2018 there will be more than 120,000 properties across 100 countries.
Unlike the Wyndham Rewards program where 15,000 points gets you a free night anywhere, properties under this system will cost 15,000 points per bedroom. In addition to this there will also be black out dates that vary by property and you can’t currently book online, although you can view the properties online here.
You also won’t be able to earn points or have elite status recognized at these properties until mid 2017. Embarrassingly Wyndham had to cancel their SPG transfer bonus and status match before it began earlier this month and that was after they sneakily made negative changes to the earning rates on the Wyndham credit card (although existing cardholders can keep the better earning rates).
I’m sure there will be some good value properties here, but until you can search and book online it seems more trouble than it’s worth (e.g at the moment you can’t view specific dates and I found it difficult to view how many bedrooms properties had to price them out). At the end of the day when a loyalty program is adding additional ways to redeem points without making any negative changes at the same time, you can’t really complain too much.
my parents bought into RCI – a timeshare exchange program owned by Wyndham. Some properties are good, some are out-of-season ski lodges and whatnot. But the thing that really chaps me is: when you pay a fee (membership, transaction, or other), with your Barclay Wyndham card, you don’t get the 10 points per dollar you would if you were spending at an EconoLodge or whatever.
It’s a wyndham organization! give me those extra points, dammit!
From what I understand they’ll be adding this ability later next year.