Where did Time Share go so wrong?
The Time Share industry in Europe seems to have gone hopelessly wrong over the years because of the greed of promoters.
The basic idea of Time Share is very sound and an attractive proposition – giving people the benefit of holidays in 5 star, usually self catering, accommodation.
To start with, the accommodation was at a single resort for a particular week of accupancy – a fixed week. In effect, the Time Share owner bought the right to occupy a particular apartment in a particular week (or multiple weeks) and was safe in the knowledge that he would never, under normal circumstances, find that his apartment was not available to him.
It did not take long before Time Share owners started informally exchanging the weeks that they owned so that they could visit other resorts. Eventually RCI and II came about to make the exchanges much easier to do. They published a catalogue of weeks that were available and carried out the exchanges, at a small fee, for the owners.
This situation lasted for quite a few years but then the Time Share organisations started to run out of weeks to sell. Each unit of accommodation can only be sold, on a fixed week basis, 50 or 51 times in a year, allowing for a week or two for maintenance, and once this had been achieved the very efficient sales organisations started to work out ways to be able to sell units more times than there were weeks available.
The solution was very simple and, in its way, elegant. They decided that since not every unit was occupied every week of the year, there was some slack in the system so why not remove the restriction on when and what unit to occupy. Why not give the owner a ‘floating’ week?
On the face of it this seems a good deal for the owner since he is not strictly limited as to his time for his holiday but there is a price to pay for this flexibility. The Time Share owner actually no longer owns any exclusive rights to ‘his’ unit – not only that, he foregoes the benefit of the guarantee that a unit will be available for him when he wants it.
The benefit for the sales organisations was immedite – they no longer had any restrictions upon how many times they could sell the same unit. With no guarantee, the owners would have to take whatever was available at the time they chose to go on holiday. Not only did the sales organisations make a killing selling weeks that did not, really, exist, they also charged owners a fat fee to convert their guaranteed, fixed weeks into ‘floating’ weeks.
This system was eventually further revised so that there was no mention of ownership at all. Time Share became a points system. Units of accommodation were not sold, instead, the sales organisations started selling ‘points’ which, effectively, are an artificial currency for use within the Time Share orbit to buy the accommodation that was wanted.
With the points system there are absolutely no restrictions upon how much Time Share ‘ownership’ can be sold and there are absolutely no guarantees that an ‘owner’ can have a unit of accommodation when he wants it.
Not only that, anybody who owns a fixed or floating week is now faced with another sales presentation that will extract even more money from him to convert what he already owns into something that is less efficient, has less guarantees and is more difficult to understand while the sales organisation recovers ownership of his units.
Where did Time Share go so wrong?
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