What is an Owner's Update?

​Most if not all of the major timeshare brands offer an "Owner's Update" when you are staying at one of their properties.  As it sounds, the Owner's Update is for owners of one of their timeshare properties and is generally meant to give Owner's an update on the program, new properties, tweaks or changes to the program and to make sure that owners are happy with their timeshare.

The Owner's Update is generally much more relaxed that a typical timeshare presentation since they are talking to actual owners who have already bought into the program.  

Most of the timeshare developers offer incentives to go to these owner updates.  In my experience, I have been offered visa gift gifts, points, free or discounted activities, resort credits and other similar incentives.

The Owner's Update definitely has a much different feel than the other timeshare presentations since they no longer have to try to convince you to buy into their program. However, the reason that they give you incentives to attend these Owner Updates is to assess your use of the program and attempt to upsell you into more points, a bigger unit or try to get you to purchase additional weeks or points. 

Additionally, the representatives have full access to your entire history of the week/points that you own so they can see the amount of reservations you have made, the purchase price of the week/points, whether you purchased from the developer or resale, the amount of exchanges that you made through Interval or RCI and various other interesting tidbits of information that gleams some interesting information on your vacation style and how you have historically used the program.

If you are not sure whether you are truly maximizing your ownership, this information can be very helpful.  It always surprises me that many timeshare owners do not exchange their weeks or simply use the week that they purchased.  For some people, this is fine but there are many, many more ways to get tremendous value out of your timeshare instead of just using your owned week.  

They generally try to use this information to show you how to get more value of your weeks/points or how additional weeks/points can help you travel more.  Most times, these types of conversations have been low key and without the high pressure sales tactics that give timeshares a bad name.  

I recently visited the Hyatt Wild Oak Ranch in San Antonio and as an Hyatt owner, we were given the option of an $100 resort credit or 7,500 World of Hyatt points in exchange for sitting down for at least 60 minutes. 

I obviously took them up on their offer as free money / points is almost always worth it to me and I was curious to hear more about the potential new rollout of the pure points system which Hyatt is allegedly creating that has been briefly discussed here.

I chose the 7,500 World of Hyatt points instead of the resort credit since I find that I can get greater than $100 of value out of the 7,500 points.  I can generally get 2-6 cents of value with World of Hyatt Points which would value this gift at anywhere between $150-$450 in value.  An awesome value for only about 60 minutes of our time.  

In my opinion, the Owner's Update is a very informal way to get more information on the timeshare system and could be a good way to learn about the various intracies of the program and to better understand exchange options, reservation windows and various other details of the timeshare system. 

The incentives that they provide can be meaningful and I generally do not mind giving them some of my precious vacation time in exchange for their various incentives.  They are generally low pressure and if the representative does not sense any potential ability to upsell you for additional weeks/points, the meeting generally goes very quick and you can get back to your vacation.  

Have you been to an Owner's Update?  What has been your experience?  If so, leave your comments below.
​