Dates and helpful tools...

If your goal is to trade or exchange your week at your home resort, you should research what the highest demand week is at your home resort. 

If you are a member of Interval International, you can do this by accessing their website, pulling up your resort, and clicking on the "Travel Demand Index" link.

Once you decide which week is the highest demand, make a plan to reserve this week exactly one year in advance.  This is the earliest (in most cases) that you can make a reservation (1 year). Set a reminder, put it on your calendar in bold, but make sure YOU DO NOT MISS THIS DATE.

If you are a Marriott Vacation Club owner, a tool you can use to help compute this date is on their website, and is called the Inventory Release Calendar. It will let you select the date you want to check in, and it will tell you the first day you can reserve. You can also call them and ask.

The next post will be more about dates to be concerned about within Interval International, once you deposit your week.

Here are a few more helpful websites

Travel Math contains several different types of "calculators" for travel purposes, and is quite powerful. Another is Cost to Drive and they have a mobile application as well.