Exclusive Resorts recently unveiled their Ultra Plan. The basics of this new “money is no object” plan are:

• 60 days of use per year
• Six advanced reservations and two priority holiday reservations
• Four active space available reservations, within a 90 day window
• Ability to use up to three residences at one time
• Unaccompanied sharing for family and friends

The cost: $795,000, with annual dues of $49,500 or for $195,000 (100% NON-refundable), current Elite members can upgrade to this plan. Or you could pay the full difference in your current membership and this new plan (could be as much as $400,000 or more) and get the 80% refund obligation.

The plan is to sell 50 upgrades and 50 new Ultra memberships, and the club reserves the right to do the same again later – for an initial total of 200. That’s a lot of new member capital that could come into the club and fund the purchasing of more homes.

This continues the trend that Exclusive Resorts started last year with its Affiliate membership – different classes of membership, with different rights, based on the membership deposit paid. Should existing members be concerned that there will now be more members with an ability to consume more of the precious holiday availability? Yes, but no more so now than before. As a member you are relying on club management to build a sustainable club that will keep most of the members happy most of the time.

So, Exclusive Resorts has decided to offer a membership tier that has the potential to bring in $50-100 million in new capital – along with debt, that can buy a lot of homes. That could benefit all members, if managed appropriately. It could also be perceived by existing members to exacerbate an already challenging availability picture at certain times of the year. Time will tell, and at the end of the day, the incentive for Exclusive Resorts is to leverage this new capital to benefit all members as much as possible.

The industry is young, but maturing. The reality is that most of the clubs probably want to start to move away from the simplistic “member-to-home” ratios that were used in the past to describe the real estate availability strategy. Increasingly members will need to rely on their club to manage home availability – while trying to maximize membership deposit revenue.

The member-to-home ratio is probably dead, replaced by a more conventional hospitality metric like % occupancy. More on that next week when we interview Richard Keith, the CEO of Private Escapes.