Riviera direct or resale?

You already have 200 direct points to use at 7 months. You’re planning to buy at Riviera because its hard to get the room category you want at 7 months but your strategy is to book at 11 months and then double book at 7 months to pull out the direct points….but you just said its hard to get what you want at Riviera at 7 months? How’s that going to work?

You have the luxury of multiple contracts. If you are really focused on Riviera for this bucket of points just get the most Riviera you can via resale so you can max out your stays there with no stress. And if you ever need to sell it you wont take a bath on the devaluation from the restrictions like when you sell Riviera direct.

thank you for the reply. pretty much everyone is saying just dont be scared of the restrictuons and buy resale if i love Riv.

Would 35-50 points at 11-month window to secure the entire stay? If so...AND if you didn't have two stays that fell in the same 7-11 month window, you could probably do it.

We have two UYs in our contract, but I realized I sometimes want to book a home resort whose points are in the latter 1/3 of my UY. So I book it at 11-months and then switch to use points from the other contract (which is in the "safe" zone for UY). So it can work.

The other think (to make it easier on yourself) is to make sure your RR points have the same UY as SSR so you can easily swap them at the 7-month window. Because mine are in different UYs, I have to call Member Services and transfer points between the memberships. And I can only do it once a year.

The thing to do would have been to buy direct at riviera instead of ssr since you already have ssr points resale and want to stay at riviera.

Riviera has availability issues with it's resort view studios because there are something like 60 of those rooms and 120ish preferred view rooms. The resale restrictions increase the competition for those 60 rooms since the resale owners at that resort know that they arnt going to have any other options for their stay since they dont have a 7 month booking window, so they risk not having a trip or losing nights on a trip by not booking those resort view rooms as soon as they can.

We own riviera direct points along with other direct and resale contracts, we usually use the riviera points at the 7 month booking window or we use them in large blocks for bigger roo. categories to do family stays, the reason why is because I dont like counting on resort view availability at that resort and we prefer to use our points with efficiency like everyone else.

The preferred view room cost and availability is a much more sound metric to use when you're considering how many points to buy and if you want them direct or resale, mainly because over time the resort view rooms will continue to get harder to book, while the preferred rooms will hopefully continue to absorb deluxe studio demand.

I think you should just keep eating the point cost on the preferred rooms for a little while longer to see if you actually need the additional points on your total point balance. If you're accustomed to getting scarce room categories at akl, then booking resort view studios at riviera wont be new to you, but id wait a few years just to see how the restriction availability dynamics play out once riviera is sold out.

Riviera resale since you plan on using them there. You already have benefits, so no need to buy direct.