posted 03-24-2005 12:36               

I own T/S in two places: Disney's Old Key West and Harbourside. Both of them have appreciated in value. And both of them are crazy flexible, fun to stay at and easy to trade out of.

Harbourside on resale would net me about 15% more today than what I paid 4 years ago, excluding annual fees(!) We have a platinum, 2 B/R lockoff in phase one which went for less than $30,000 at the time.

We have used it 5 times (we're local, so we use it at the drop of a hat sometimes, depending on availablility), staying on both side of the lockoff (never needed both at the same time). Our sons have both used it with Spring Break buddies as well. We have converted to Starpoints two years and used the original point grant and the conversions to do 10 days in Hawaii including first class rountrip airfare on AA (split between Oahu and Maui), just over a week in Chile and various and sundry air tickets including some pretty complicated round trips to the west coast, including 4 tickets last year to Seattle to catch an Alaska cruise (which we could have swapped for via II, but that seemed impossibly complicated at the time - I'm now much farther up on the learning curve and would do things differently).

We plan to swap some time this year (Staroptions) for Sheraton's resort in Avon Colorado.

Bottom line, Peter. If you're gonna use this thing, especially since LGA / JFK are now less than $300 away round trip, I don't think you have made a mistake at all (assuming you didn't rescind).

And you probably know by now that annual fees are not $1,400 per bedroom as someone seemed to imply (that was last year's fees for our platinum 2 b/r lockoff).

All in all we're certainly getting our money's worth.