Here at Sell My Timeshare NOW and Timeshare Broker Services, we feel like we’re having our own version of Super Bowl advertising excitement. We’ve launched our second new ad this week, which appears in print in The Resort Trades magazine, (page 37) in the February issue.

As you see in the ad, our message is simple and transparent.

“WHEN THE SOLUTION TO RESALES IS CRYSTAL CLEAR.

Transparency, reliability, and a proven track record of sales.”

Sell My Timeshare NOW and Timeshare Broker Services

(877) 815-4227 and (877) 884 9577

jaybade@sellmytimesharenow.com

We want to make it crystal clear where we stand on timeshare resale and rental services. As Vacation Hotdeal Companies, Inc, we offer services that target the many different types of timeshare needs.

SellMyTimeshareNOW.com is the recognized industry leader in by-owner timeshare resale and timeshare rental advertising and brokerage sales. Timeshare Broker Services is one of the most respected names in the business, providing brokerage services for buying or renting timeshare. And Vacation Property Solutions offers customized resale and rental solutions for timeshare developers, HOAs, and management companies.

…all delivered with our fullest commitment to quality service our clients can rely on.

Please look for this ad in The Resort Trades and other timeshare and vacation ownership publications.

The following article by Jason Tremblay is published here with the permission of The Resort Trades. Please visit their website to read more: www.theresorttrades.com

New Commerce and the Timeshare Buyer

The next timeshare buyer may never stop at an OPC kiosk. He or she may ignore the invitation that came in the mail offering a free weekend at a desirable resort, and is likely to let the sales calls from the developer go to voice mail … and stay there.

In a marketplace that is changing faster than most businesses can keep pace, the next wave of timeshare buyers will buy or rent in different ways, for different reasons, and via different transactional processes than any segment of shoppers – for any type of product – has done in the past. From shopping to reading books to selecting restaurants, consumers are making buying decisions in ways the business world has never before experienced. In the U.S. alone, some 80 percent of people have personal Internet access, with many others making use of an employer, friend or relative’s Internet service. But that barely scratches the surface of what new commerce means to timeshare. Just as the business world begins to get a handle on e-commerce, along comes “m-commerce” (buying on a mobile device) and “t-commerce” (buying on a tablet device). While at first glance these may all seem to be the same process, they are in fact, each a distinctly unique shopping and buying experience.

M-commerce, and to a lesser degree, t-commerce, gives consumers the capability to simultaneously interact with a business both in person and online. Buyers can use online coupons, tickets and discounts directly from their phone at an event, service location, or storefront. The potential to deliver targeted coupons and invitations to consumers because the consumer’s mobile phone has communicated that he or she is in the neighborhood of your resort is not futuristic stuff; it is already a reality.

Consider the dramatic consumer pattern changes that were evidenced in holiday shopping this past year, 2011. Where once the dawning of Christmas morning brought holiday shopping to a quiet pause, today’s connectivity has given rise to stores and businesses where the doors never close, the virtual sales staff never clocks out, and the transactions never stop. On Christmas Day alone, the dollar amount of purchases made over mobile devices was up nearly 173 percent over the sales transaction numbers for Christmas Day 2010. A total of 7 percent of all purchases made online on that day were t-commerce transactions, made specifically on iPads; 6.5 percent were m-commerce, made on iPhones. And these numbers only look at a portion of what was happening, with Android and other devices not accounted for in this research.

A website that offers an effective and enticing user experience is critical for most types of business. But almost overnight the visibility and usability of your site has become only a piece of the marketing paradigm. Some online businesses are reporting as much as 50 percent of their transactions occurring via a tablet or mobile device, a serious challenge when you consider that the functionality of many websites does not translate well, if at all, for mobile or tablet users.

And as much as the user experience is different from one type of Internet access device to another, so are the metrics for measuring their effectiveness. In the same way that page views and clicks must be measured for computer users, so must a consumer’s swipes and taps (what many refer to as “smudges and swipes”) be measured in t-commerce.

Yet the shifting sands of commerce involve more than the technology by which clients and prospective customers will reach us and we will reach them. Consumers do not use their phones and tablets in the same way they use desktop computers, nor do they access them under the same circumstances or for the same reasons. New commerce technology takes business into consumer’s lives at the most intimate of levels. Your next timeshare buyer may be curled up in bed surfing your inventory via a tablet. He or she may be accessing your mobile site while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room. Your opportunity to sell to this buyer may happen at midnight or on Christmas morning and the odds are high that neither you nor your sales team will have the opportunity to be personally involved with the transaction until it has reached its final stages, if then.

Business focus must be as much on creating a “personal” experience for consumers as on the technology behind the experience. Measuring clicks, taps, smudges and swipes is not enough. Business cannot lose sight of the human element. While the future of timeshare sales may lie in electronic exchanges in which the seller and buyer never make eye contact and never shake hands on their deal, this heightens the requisite that businesses find ways to make online engagement feel sincere, warm, personable and trustworthy.

As the technologies of new commerce evolve, timeshare sales, resales and rentals find themselves uniquely positioned. While there is strength and market depth in selling additional timeshare to those who already own the product, the vast breadth of the buying market for timeshares lies in consumers who have never owned a timeshare. In a world where there’s very little new for most consumers, timeshares are uncharted waters and a foreign, or at least misunderstood product in the eyes of most potential buyers.

As author and visionary Seth Godin recently blogged, “… teaching people to buy anything for the first time is a revolutionary concept. Campbell’s soup is almost never bought for the first time. It is a replacement purchase. No one switches to Campbell’s either. They buy it because their mom did.”

No can of soup, timeshares are much more a can of worms, and the timeshare industry has its work cut out for it. The industry’s future must be pinned on selling a reinvigorated timeshare product via an assortment of new commerce technologies to both the returning market and the revolutionary first time buyer.

(from Volume 26, No.2 February 5, 2012, The Resort Trades)

The following excerpt is from the article “Today in Timeshare” written by Sharon Drechsler-Scott for the January 2012 issue of The Resort Trades. It is reprinted here with permission from The Resort Trades. Described as a “Window into the industry” we encourage you to read this timely article in full in the print edition of the magazine or online at: http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1v5cg/January2012TheResort/resources/14.htm

…Closing remarks: Jason Tremblay, CEO, Sell My Timeshare NOW

While investigating the proposed introduction of timeshare resale legislation in Florida, Resort Trades caught up with the owner of the resale firm, Sell My Timeshare NOW, Jason Tremblay. As he puts its, “Resales and transfer companies are topics about which  I certainly have a lot of passion. No entrepreneur wants to hear the government is going to impose an increased burden on their business and obviously, compliance with additional regulations will cost Sell My Timeshare Now time and money. However, we are supportive of regulations that are reasonable and which can be enforced fairly.”

Tremblay compares the current abuse of consumers by resale operators who behave unethically and unlawfully to the situation in which timeshare found itself in the early ‘80s prior to the introduction of timeshare regulations: Then as now, there were a few bad players using clearly unethical marketing practices that threatened the very foundations of the industry.

“We hope to see that Florida Attorney General Bondi will carefully review ARDA’s Timeshare Resale Model Act while crafting her proposed bill with an eye to ensuring that regulations will be enforceable. For example, we understand that one portion of her draft legislation calls for all third-party advertisers to be able to disclose past success rates, regardless of whether they solicit customers (which we do not). For those of us who frequently connect buyers directly with owners, we have no way of tracking the success of those contacts once they are conversing independently. So we do hope this proposed legislation will understand the need for practicality in their requirements for advertisers.”

“But overall,” says Tremblay, “we are very glad to see some legislation being considered that will reduce consumer fraud. It’s been a space that has been unregulated for too long. And it will be far easier to stop someone who is clearly breaking the law than it would be to prove the intent to commit fraud as things stand today.”

The following article, written by Jason Tremblay, appears in the December issue of The Resort Trades and is published here with their permission. At this time of year when many of us pause and reflect, it seems appropriate to share with you these insights on generosity, which is, as it turns out, as good for the mind as it is the heart.

Stimulating Our Brains with Good, Old-Fashioned Generosity

There is a simple calculator available at www.globalrichlist.com. The online calculator doesn’t ask for your name or your email address in order to use it. Instead, it requires only that you input your annual salary and identify whether that number represents pounds, yen, Loonies, US dollars or Euros.

When you enter your numbers and then click the button appropriately marked “show me the money,” you instantly receive a ranking that tells you where you personally stand in the world’s measure of wealth. Enter a salary of 100,000 US dollars and you will find out you are approximately the 39,615,049^th richest person in the world, earning in the top .66 percent.

Now here’s what is even more remarkable: enter a salary amount of only 10,000 US dollars and you will learn that you rank in the top 13 percent of the world’s wealthiest people. You are approximately the 798,928,823^rd richest person among, what at the time the calculator was developed, was a global population of 6 billion people.

Although we know there are now more than 7 billion people on this planet, the intent of the calculator has not changed. Those of us who were fortunate to have been born in an industrialized nation often fail to realize how lucky we are. We overlook how extremely wealthy even the poorest among us are by comparison to much of the rest of the world. Instead, we focus only on those who have more and those who have most.

In the United States, the last truly generous generation included the men and women of the Great Depression. Since that time, we collectively have become more self focused and have given to those in need by smaller and smaller proportions. That’s right, Americans were more generous by percentage during the hard hit 1930s than any generation has been since.

If you are reading this issue of The Resort Trades, then you are still standing

Here in the timeshare industry, we’ve spent much of the past 3 years agonizing, grinding our teeth and holding our breath to see what will happen next. Challenges to the national and global economies have hit hard. Businesses have fallen by the wayside, families have lost their homes and few if any among us have remained untouched by the faltering economy and its fallout.

While vacation ownership may not be growing as much or as quickly as we would like, the timeshare industry is still in business. Some of the rules have changed and some of the players have bowed out, but as an industry, we are still employing people, helping support families, enriching local economies, paying taxes and providing vacation opportunities to hard working people who both need and deserve time to relax and recoup.

Food, sex, generosity and timeshares

Businesses that survived the economic depression of the 1930s typically went on to be successful. And companies that were actually founded during times of economic recession or even a full blown depression, have a particularly distinctive history of success, including IBM, Procter & Gamble and General Electric, to name a few.

Why? Because they started out as survivors and they never lost that mentality.

As we enter the holiday season, a time that is traditionally supposed to be about family, brotherly love and caring for others, we all have an opportunity to make someone else’s life easier and ironically, make ourselves happier in the process.

Studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health and others show that in fact, it really is better to give than to receive. Neuroscientists conducting brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging research on healthy adult subjects have discovered that three things “light up” the happiness centers of the brain: food, sex and giving money to charity.

Even more surprisingly, when it comes to the three big happiness makers, the brain doesn’t seem to rank one more highly than the other. Nicholas D. Kristof, author of the New York Times blog, “On the Ground” surmises in an article titled, “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving,” that …we are hard-wired to be altruistic.

Armed with that insight you have to wonder where we could go both as individuals and as an industry if we let go of fear, greed, backbiting and infighting. What if we looked around, acknowledged our abundance, patted ourselves, our peers and even our competitors on the back, congratulating us all that we have survived the challenges of the past few years and are in fact, still standing? Then, in a spirit of giving that is not just limited to the holiday season, what if we set out to make others and ourselves a whole lot happier by stimulating the neural pathways of our brains with good, old-fashioned generosity?

The following article “I ♥  Heart Timeshare” by Jason Tremblay appears in the current issue of The Resort Trades magazine. This excerpt is reprinted with permission of The Resort Trades. The full article can be found in its entirety at I ♥  Heart Timeshare.

The Resort Trades