RCI Review

I don't know why anyone would recommended RCI - our experiences have been a real nightmare for us.  We purchased a timeshare because of the sales pitch regarding all of the trading opportunities with it's points partners.  The price of converting it to points - $2500.00.  The year we converted, it was a good deal, and we were able to exchange our points for 4 plane tickets to Hawaii during the Christmas holidays.  Every year since, the cost of the RCI membership has risen sharply, the numbers of points required for points partners has increased, and the rules regarding their points program have changed dramatically.  The last time we booked a flight was in 2007 and we had to pay 3 years membership in advance in order to book.  Since then we have saved 300,000, so we could book flights for our family.  Much to my dismay, when we called RCI this week to redeem our points for flights, we were informed we can now only use 30% of the points in our current use year for points partners - or in our case only 60,000 points.  We tried to apply the 60,000 to flights - and it cost significantly more to use our these 60,000 points than to book the same flights through Hotwire, Travelocity or Expedia.  We asked for a copy of RCI's current points policy in writing, and were informed there is no written policy available.  We asked why we hadn't been informed of the changes since we had prepaid three years of membership.  We were informed RCI is not legally required to provide this information to their members because the primary purpose of RCI is to exchange timeshare holidays, not point partner rewards.  So, to recap, we have paid $2500.00 to convert our weeks timeshare to points, three years of RCI membership fees, our timeshire's maintenance fee for three years, have given up our time at our resort for almost three years and it is too late to book any time at our Gold Crown beautiful timeshare or any other Gold Crown resort that we can drive to during the next year.  This has really been a costly venture with nothing to show for the price for the past three years.  Our Advice - Don't buy a timeshare unless you want to use your home resort, and whatever you do, don't purchase a timeshare for the benefit of exchanging with RCI's points partners.  RCI is a ripoff.