Effective today the luxury vacation club Exclusive Resorts has realigned and unpackaged its membership plans to provide a broader array of options.

Exclusives last increase was on August 1st 2007. With its new plan structures the club has 6 base plans, and then members can choose to add holiday period priority access and a family sharing option. Under the old structure different plan levels had different amounts of holiday access built into the plan. The new plans are shown in the table below.

According to Anne Griebling at Exclusive Resorts the club has done a lot of research amongst members and prospective members and realized they need to "unpackage" everything. What people wanted was a truly flexible membership.

Under the new plans if members want to reserve holiday periods in advance they pay an additional, non-refundable one-time fee. For advance reservations at Spring Break, the 4th of July holiday, or Thanksgiving (referred to as "Select Holiday") the fee is $39,900. For advance reservations at Christmas, New Years and Presidents Day (referred to as "Peak Holiday") and including "Select Holidays" the fee is $59,900.

Members on base plans can still reserve holiday periods if they are available within the space available window for their membership plan.

As with all destination clubs, the large homes mean that family and friends are welcomed, with the member playing host. However, if a club member would like their extended family to use the club without the member being present then Exclusive offers an extended family sharing option. The charge for this is a non-refundable one-time fee of $19,000 and an annual 10% dues premium.

Last year when we covered family use of destination club homes, the fee for Exclusives family sharing option was $10,000 with a 20% dues premium.

At the same time as coming out with its new membership plans, Exclusive also reduced the amount of the refundable deposit to 75% for all the base plan amounts. It will be interesting to see if any of the other clubs follow suit from what had become an industry norm of 80%.

In reality Exclusive has changed the refundable deposit by more than 5%. Its prior 25 and 45 night plans used to include holiday reservations, but now members pay for these with a non-refundable fee.

The new structures do provide potential members with more flexibility. If you don't want or need to travel at holiday times you don't have to pay for them, or if you want to reserve multiple holiday periods you can buy more.

Anne also talked through how members can easily upgrade from one plan to the next. Or if you know your travel plans will increase in the future eg if you're approaching retirement, you can join at say a 40 night plan and pay the 40 night deposit (at todays rate) but only pay the annual dues for 20 or 30 nights for the first few years. Members can even make this adjustment on an annual basis, opting to pay lower annual dues for less annual travel time.