Let's start with ALG. ALG is Apple Leisure Group, a conglomerate managing a number of subsidiary companies offering an array of travel products and services. Among other businesses, the conglomerate includes:
1. AMResorts - Originally, offering resort and brand management for these resort brands: Zoetry, Secrets, Breathless, Dreams and Sunscape. Alua, a brand of European resorts, was added in 2018.
2. Apple Vacations - An online travel agency offering hotels, flights and ground transportation.
3. Cheap Caribbean - Another online travel agency. Cheap Caribbean was a separate company, but was purchased by ALG in 2013. It continues to operate separately from Apple Vacations but offers many of the same products with close, if not identical, pricing.
4. Amstar - A company that provides ground transportation and excursions.
5. Funjet - A company that provides chartered air service.
6. Unlimited Vacation Club - A travel club offering discount vacations at AMResorts properties.
7. Trisept Solutions - The company providing the technology (software, databases, etc.) to run the business side of the travel industry, including: reservations, call center, database interconnections and customer relationship management solutions.
When we joined UVC in 2019, ALG owned UVC. Hyatt purchased ALG in November 2021, and when they did, all those subsidiary companies came with it. ALG and its subsidiaries still exist today, but now Hyatt is their parent company. Today, if you type amresorts.com into your web browser, you will be automatically re-directed to hyattinclusivecollection.com. That's not an accident. Hyatt re-branded ALG's "AMR Collection" to its own "Inclusive Collection" in May 2022. Today, Hyatt provides the resort and brand management for AMResorts brands.
Back to the original question: What is UVC?
UVC is the Unlimited Vacation Club, a subsidiary company of ALG. It's a travel club and the loyalty program for AMResorts. UVC offers its members all-inclusive resort stays and other travel products and services at discounted prices.
If you ever visit an AMResorts property, you probably will be approached during your stay by a UVC representative inviting you to a sales pitch for the club. Typically, you'll be offered resort cash or some other gratuity to entice you to the meeting. They'll tell you it will take an hour, but that's dependent on how many questions you ask and whether you're actually interested in joining or really just there for the free gift. When we joined in 2019, our meeting took about 3 hours, but we were interested and had a lot of questions.