Barbara;
Lawgs has given a pretty good explanation. You do not need to join the GoGlobal program. I have 3 weeks and balked at paying $3900 to join the program. One of my problems with a weeks system that switches over to a points based system is that certain owners actually lose. For example, my week 50 is considered a low time and as such, in the points system, it can only trade for a like unit at a low season. During the medium or high system, my week doesn't genate enough points and as such, I cannot trade into those weeks. In the weeks system, I could and have traded my week for other weeks of the year including Xmas week which is a very high demand week. After a period of time, I ended up with 3 weeks, 2 during prime weeks and 1 during a low week. I saw no reason to join my week 50 into the points system as I actually lose value when doing so since I have now restricted which weeks I can trade into. Sure, the cost doing the internal is lower but almost any trade I would have wanted would have resulted in me not having enough points. GoGlobal does offer the opportunity to purchase the additional points to make the trade but again, in the weeks program it had been an equal trade whereas in the points system I now have an additional cost and concern.
As such, I was thinking of leaving my week 50 in the weeks program and considering joining the other two weeks into the GoGlobal. One thing that they offered was an upgrade of my low unit into a high week unit which would bring all my other units into the GoGlobal program. So by upgrading my week 50 into week 52, it brought all my units into GoGlobal. It cost more than just upgrading all three weeks but less than buying another unit, even a studio but because of the time that I go on vacation, I now can go 4 weeks instead of 3 weeks with all of them into a 2-bedroom unit. Oh, buying another unit will also bring all your units into the GoGlobal program but that wouldn't have gained me much except a higher price and additional points that I couldn't use. If you bought your weeks resale, the cost of going into GoGlobal is nuts ($5000 per week). At $1295 per week, I thought is was way too much but depending on your use, it may work out to your advantage. A rough calculations on my part was that it would take 10 years to recover the initial fee and that is if I was exchanging every year. With 4 weeks, it would cost roughly $5200 to have all 4 of your weeks join GoGlobal. If you purchased resale and are thinking about joining GoGlobal, you might consider upgrading the unit from a lower point total week to a higher point total week as the additional cost might not be much more than the cost of having the resale week join the GoGlobal system.
You can keep your weeks as they are and still use RCI weeks. If I understand correctly, if a resort is RCI points, everyone sees the resort as RCI points except the resort owners who didn't switch to RCI points. OLCC is not an RCI Points resort in the same sense that my Vacation Village at Parkway (VVP) is an RCI resort. My points for VVP are automatically deposited into RCI Points and I can either call RCI or use the website to make reservation. I must have an RCI Points membership. In GoGlobal, OLCC has a corporate account with RCI where you call your GoGlobal advisor and make the request and not RCI. As such, GoGlobal members don't really have or need a RCI membership.
As far as joining GoGlobal, it depends on whether you feel it works to your advantage or not. If you trade the two weeks yearly, then it may make sense to have those two units in GoGlobal but the payback may be longer as you still will need to maintain an RCI weeks account for your other units. When I calculated 10 years, I treated membership in RCI and GoGlobal as a wash ($89 versus $89) as I looked at dropping RCI in favor of GoGlobal and looked at the difference in exchange fees ($164 for RCI and $40 for GoGlobal) where there is a $124 saving on the exchange fee. Of course, you only have to pay the membership fee once no matter how many weeks you have but if you keep both RCI and GoGlobal membership, the membership fee should be calculated into whether it is something that will pay for itself. In effect, the first week that you exchange in GoGlobal will be the membership fee ($89) plus the exchange fee ($40). The second week you exchange would only have the GoGlobal exchange. For RCI exchanges, for the two weeks it would be 2 X $164 or $328 dollars. For two GoGlobal exchanges, it would be $89 + 2 X $40 or $169 per year. There would be a savings of $328 - $169 or a savings of $159 per year. With an initial fee of $2600, it would take a little over 16 years to recover the initial cost ($2600 / $159).
If you use your two weeks every year, it may make sense to drop RCI as you aren't going to exchange anyway. If you do look to exchange those weeks, you might look at other exchange companies such as SFX for those rare periods when you may wish to exchange them. If you drop RCI, my payback period goes back to roughly 10 years. Because of my weeks and the number of points, I estimated my backback period to be less than this because I gained another week (although at a slightly higher cost than presented here) to use. Another factor to consider and I don't have enough information on it is that GoGlobal will take your other week in for exchange so you may be able to exchange those weeks within GoGlobal as well. I don't know the details on this program and as Lawgs said, some of the aspects of the program seem to be evolving. Depending on what this program stipulates, you may need to only have one of your weeks in the program and be able to deposit your other weeks into the program. Something to think about.
