WorldMark^® Words

It's been a slow time around here for WorldMark activities. Yard and garden work has been a priority, leaving little time for vacation thoughts. Here are a couple of pictures from the backyard garden to tide things over. The swallowtail butterfly was busy visiting the flowers when I took these pictures.



At one point a wasp flew up behind the butterfly. When he got real close the butterfly turned around to face him. I didn't capture the face to face meeting, but here's a picture of the wasp approaching.



I'm getting caught up in the garden, there should be some WorldMark news to report soon. In the meantime, enjoy the butterfly.

If you are going to be at a WorldMark resort that is near a national park this weekend, you can enter the park without paying the normal entrance fee. That can save you anywhere from $3 to $25. A few of the national parks that are near WorldMark resorts are Zion and Bryce Canyon in Utah, Yosemite in California, and of course Rocky Mountain National Park here in Colorado.

If you miss this weekend there are a couple of more free days coming up. According to the National Park Service web site, upcoming free days are September 15 (Public Lands Day) and November 11 (Veterans Day). The downside to the free days is that the parks will probably be more crowded than usual. Don't let that stop you, enjoy those fee free days.

Do you want to know more about booking WorldMark reservations and about the TravelShare program? There is a new Quick Start Guide available on the WorldMark web site. It contains information about WorldMark credit and Bonus Time reservations which are available to all owners. It also has information about TravelShare Fun Time and RCI exchanges for TravelShare members. There is a list of contacts for additional information or answers to questions you may have. I didn't see anything earth shattering in the guide, but it could be a handy reference at times.

The link to the Quick Start Guide is on the WorldMark web site home page. You may have to scroll down a little to find it. Click on the link and it will open the guide as a PDF document. You can view the document online or save it to your computer so you always have it handy.

The nominees for the WorldMark Board of Directors election have been announced. There are 14 candidates for 2 director positions. You can find the candidate announcement and the candidate statements on the WorldMark web site. The election link is currently the 4th item down on the home page but that could change as new material is added. In answer to a question some have asked, and as you can confirm by looking at the announcement, I am not a candidate in the election.

This year an official election web site is being set up for comments concerning the election and the candidates. The details and a form which can be used to submit your comments are on the WorldMark web site. You can also submit comments via mail. Either way your comments need to be received at the WorldMark offices by August 6.

The election period ends at the annual owners meeting on October 21, 2010. I'm sure we will be hearing more about the election as we get closer to that date. I normally don't post much about the election and will probably follow that tradition again this year. I prefer to emphasize the many good things about WorldMark and much of the election chatter you hear stresses the negative. I could always change my mind though, you never know.

The WorldMark Pinetop resort is nestled in the woods in the White Mountains of Arizona. We have visited there quite a few times, the most recently being last month when we stopped for 3 days on our way home from Las Vegas. At an altitude of 7100 feet, Pinetop is a lot cooler than Las Vegas. It was 104 the day we left Las Vegas and Phoenix hit 112. The highest temperature in Pinetop during the three days we were there was 84.

You can be as active as you desire at Pinetop. There are many hiking trails in the area and we saw a number of people at the resort who had brought their mountain bikes with them. If you are into antiques it seems like there is an antique shop on every other corner. And if you want casino activities you can get that too, at the Hon-Dah Resort and Casino just a few miles up the road past the WorldMark resort.

Or if you just want to kick back and relax, you can enjoy the views of the woods from your deck as seen in the picture below. It wouldn't surprise me to see a deer come walking by, although all we saw were some birds and very busy squirrels.

I saw a story caption announcing the 22nd Annual Rocky Mountain Mustang Roundup in Steamboat Springs. It's a western mountain town in a western state, so my thought was that they were putting on a horse show. You know, Mustang ponies, cowboys, the Pony Express, all those western things.

Not quite! Here's the description of the gathering from the Steamboat Springs event calendar:

"More than 450 Mustang owners from Rocky Mountain Mustang clubs will convene in Steamboat Springs over Father's Day Weekend. Activities will include a scenic mountain tour, auto cross, Friday night social, Show n' Shine Car Show and awards breakfast. Spectators are welcome at the Meadows parking lot located at the corner of Mt. Werner Road and Pine Grove Road for Friday's Autocross."

The dates are June 17 to June 20, next weekend. If you are going to be in Steamboat Springs and are interested in cars this is your chance to see some Western Mustangs. There is no admission charge for the public events. If you don't already have reservations there is still some limited availability at the WorldMark Steamboat Springs resort. It's within the Bonus Time window, you wouldn't need to spend any of your credits if you didn't want to.

A few weeks ago I posted some pictures from our March trip to Arizona. Since then I've been playing with some new software that I picked up at Costco. Among other things it has the capability to create slide shows and save them as a Windows media file. My first experiment was to create a slideshow using pictures from several of our visits to the Tucson area. The show highlights some of the resort and area attractions. The result is not as fancy of a presentation as the RCI TV that I talked about in my last post but it isn't bad. You can see the slideshow by clicking here.

A word of warning, it is a big file. With a high speed cable connection it takes over 30 seconds to download completely before beginning the slideshow. The file will open in the default video player for your system, typically Windows Media Player if you are running Micosoft Windows. Once it loads the slide show runs about three minutes.

I'm not completely satisfied with the image quality, the software seems to have cut it down somewhat in the transition to the video format. That is especially true at full screen size on a large high resolution monitor. But I just learning the software and I'm not sure I have all of the settings right. Since pictures are a popular feature of my sites I figured I'd pass it along for everyone to see. I spotted at least one typo in the captions that I left intact to see if everyone was paying attention.

There has been an owner advisory on the WorldMark web site for some time now concerning third-party organizations soliciting WorldMark owners for rental or resale purposes. Here's a little more information concerning some of the organizations that might contact you to rent or sell your WorldMark account.

Quoting from an article on the SunSentinel.com web site titled Complaints about timeshare resale companies on the rise: "The Florida Attorney General's Office said it is investigating 17 companies, has sued three others and reached settlements with seven more for about $1.6 million in customer refunds. The office expects to investigate more companies this year." No specific companies are mentioned in the article but it does talk about some of the problems encountered with paying up front fees. You can read the entire article on the SunSentinel.com web site.

It's apparent that I have the Ask A Question function working ok now. Dean from Washington sent this one in:

As of todays date, approximately how many credits does Wyndham hold in inventory waiting to be sold?

I don't know the answer to that question but there is some data available that you can use to get a pretty good idea of what the number is. From the 2009 election results that are posted on the WorldMark web site, Wyndham had 79,390 developer votes to cast. The current average account size is just over 10,000 credits which means that there are two votes per account. If there are 79,390 votes and each vote is based on 5,000 credits, you can multiply those two numbers together to get an approximation of the total number of credits that the developer held as of the record date for the election. 79,390 multiplied by 5,000 is 396,950,000.

Looking at it another way, the 2010 WorldMark budget listed in the March, 2010 Destinations magazine, shows projected developer dues of $30,451,576. For an average account size of 10,000+ credits the annual dues are currently $678. Dividing the projected developer dues by the dues per account ($30,451,576/$678) yields 44,914 accounts. At 10,000 credits per account that's a total of almost 450,000,000 developer credits.

These numbers indicate that Wyndham holds somewhere between 400 and 450 million credits in their inventory. The lower number is based on data from last year and the higher number is based on projections for the coming year. The actual number is probably somewhere between the two values. In any case it is a large number.

One interesting observation is that the inventory appears to be projected to grow somewhat in the coming year. With no new resorts coming online to add credits to the system that means that a significant number of owners are continuing to default on their accounts and those accounts are being repossessed. Even though sales are continuing, but in a much more limited fashion than they were a few years ago, it seems that more credits are being repossessed that are being sold. WorldMark experienced a net reduction of 10,000 owners in 2009, it looks like the we can expect to see another decline in the number of owners in 2010.

The Winter Solstice occurs at 10:45 AM today, the shortest day of the year. In keeping with the theme, I'll make this one of the shortest posts of the year, most of it copied from last December's similar post.

To all my WorldMark friends who visit here, I wish you a safe, happy, and very

MERRY CHRISTMAS

   

I'm taking a couple of weeks off, I'll see you next year!