I have been going on about Global Discovery/Global Advantage since we bought into it in October, but this is our first try at getting the system to work.

My mom recently expressed an interest in going to Texas to see the Alamo.  She was going to use her timeshare (an efficiency in the Poconos) to go down, but I suggested that we could use our Global Discovery membership this year, upgrade to a two-bedroom, and we could all go.  Everyone seemed into it.

Well, I started looking at airline prices to Texas, and it looked like we would be paying around $700 just for the three of us (me, Berta, and Abby) to go.  This is a lot of money that we could use in Orlando instead.  So I told Mom that we were probably not going to go because of the expense of the airfare, but that I would gift this year's Global Discovery vacation to her (it's a technical term, "gift", when you let someone use your timeshare when you're not there) if she and Nana still wanted to go.

So I put in the reservation by fax, changing my original selections so that the "start credit" that I was going to use to upgrade from a 1 to a 2 bedroom unit was used to cover the gifting costs.  No big deal.

I'm supposed to hear back from someone with the availability in San Antonio by Monday.  I've actually spoken at length to someone at Global Discovery now, and I still don't feel right about the whole thing.  Maybe it's just the difference in location.  People in Kansas might be strange.

Also, I put in some requests for the buying service just to see what it could do for us.  It has turned out the same way as any price match does.  They will only match the price of local companies that offer the product.  So I can't compare prices to Amazon or eCost.  The item that I had them price was $100 cheaper on eCost than the price they gave me.  If they honored their 100% difference refund for internet companies, I could have paid only $500 for a $1000 MSRP item.  (It's a video camera by Panasonic that uses SD memory cards called the SDAV100, in case you were curious.)

Needless to say, I'm not spending $500 or $1000 on anything with our vacation coming in just 8 months.  But I am anxious to hear about how our reservations turn out, and if they work, I'll be curious to see how well Mom likes the place they set up.