By educating consumers, a timeshare organization seeks to make an industry-wide difference.

Recently, while browsing an online news page, I found an article about an independent company that is promoting seminars and books about the resort timeshare industry. The goal of this company is to educate consumers about the world of timeshare, and raise public awareness about some of the duplicitous hard-sell techniques used by timeshare salespeople. According to this company, Timeshare Insights, when people become more educated about timeshare, it will force the timeshare industry to discard outdated and unethical sales practices. As someone familiar with the timeshare industry, this made a lot of sense to me. I checked out the Timeshare Insights site and found that it offered a lot of good advice to timeshare buyers, so I decided to link to it and mention this site in today’s post.

This made me think about the state of the timeshare industry and how it has changed in recent years. In the beginning, blatant timeshare rip-offs were commonplace, and some people paid lots of money for timeshares that didn’t exist. When major hotel chains began investing in timeshares, they brought respectability to an industry suffering from negative public perception. Resort developers realized that, in order to compete with these hotel giants, they would have to treat their clientele better.

The industry has been improving steadily in this area, but the sales and marketing divisions of a lot of resort development companies are still holding on to the old-fashioned idea that a timeshare buyer has to be suckered into making a purchase.

It sounds crazy, but maybe people would buy timeshare directly from the resort company if they didn’t have to sit through a questionable sales presentation, and then pay the ridiculous marketing expenses included in the original purchase price of any new timeshare offering.

I think one of the core concepts here is that given more education on the subject, timeshare buyers and owners have the power to change the entire timeshare industry from the ground up.

Be sure and check out Timeshare Insights. There’s plenty of good information there. When we find more online timeshare resources, I’ll link to them from this blog.