The Resort Trades

The following article by Jason Tremblay appears in this month’s issue of The Resort Trades. The print edition is available to attendees at ARDA World 2013, and by subscription. The online edition is available now at The Resort Trades website, or in The Resort Trades virtual magazine. Thank you to the publication for permission to reprint the article in full. 

VacationOwnership.com: One Company’s Big Move to Respond to a Resale Market in Transition

by Jason Tremblay

Many companies start small but few start out any smaller than did Sell My Timeshare NOW. Launched as a home-based business with only three employees, the company began in 2003 with the goal of providing timeshare owners and vacationers an easy, effective way to buy, rent or sell secondary market timeshare via the Internet.

Along the way, Sell My Timeshare NOW expanded to include licensed timeshare brokerage, a service added in 2006. In 2009, through a division originally called Vacation Property Services, the company began also offering custom resort services. Today through the resort services division of the company’s brokerage brand, (VacationOwnership.com Realty), the company provides resorts, developers, HOAs and timeshare management companies with client-specific services that have been expressly designed to help them serve the resale needs of their owner base.

But much has changed over the past decade, not only for Sell My Timeshare NOW, but for the timeshare and vacation ownership industry as a whole. By 2008, the company’s fast growth had attracted expansion funding from Edison Venture Fund, an investor with a history of backing high-growth, entrepreneurial technology organizations.

In 2012, Edison Venture Fund sold its equity interest through a merger transaction, and in August of 2012, Sell My Timeshare NOW, which by then also included the brand VacationOwnership.com, announced a strategic partnership with Vacation Innovations LLC. From modest beginnings as a business operated out of the spare room in the home of one of the company’s founders, followed by a decade of steady growth, the merger and partnership with Vacation Innovations LLC has resulted in one of the world’s largest timeshare resale and rental companies.

Ten years ago, the Internet was only beginning to change the way people made their travel and vacation plans. Nowadays, widespread consumer confidence in booking travel online and preference for the ease and accessibility online booking affords, along with dramatic changes in perceptions and realities regarding the economy, job security, retirement nest eggs and spending patterns, in general, have shaped a new market of timeshare consumer.

Some surveys show as high as 93 percent of frequent travelers use the Internet to research, discuss or book travel, while over 50 percent of vacationers say their vacation destination and accommodations decisions were influenced by Facebook. If you are in the timeshare business today, you are in the business of online marketing and sales and of social media messaging and engagement.

Next Generation Technology Approach to Reach the Next Generation of Timeshare Owners

The evolving services and brands that began as Sell My Timeshare NOW are defined as: SellMyTimeshareNOW.com for by-owner timeshare resale and rental; VacationOwnership.com Realty for licensed timeshare brokerage and custom resort services; and ResortRentals.com, the company’s newest brand, which when fully launched will mark a fresh, aggressive and energized approach to resale marketing and timeshare rental. Collectively, the company’s brands are now part of VacationOwnership.com LLC.

This past month, VacationOwnership.com LLC cut the ribbon on new offices in Exeter, N.H. The purpose-built facility provides 20,000 square feet of new workspace, including 700 square feet of break room and training area. Equipped for next-generation technology needs with state-of-the-art workstations, the new office, in combination with the company’s existing offices in Orlando, Fla., marks a strategic move to take VacationOwnership.com LLC into a new age and an innovative perspective on vacation ownership and vacation rentals.

The company’s new offices represent a $1.5 million investment in a bright future. Geographically positioned to better attract prospective employees from Boston’s tech-savvy labor pool, the move to 100 Domain Drive in Exeter is more than a relocation. VacationOwnership.com LLC’s new location is a statement about a stable, growing company that believes the future of timeshares is no longer found in yesterday’s business models, but in a consumer-centric approach that is built not on what we may want to sell, but on what consumers what to buy, delivered in the ways they want to receive it.

Online Travel Agencies Have Blazed the Trail

Vacationers expect to be in control of their booking experience for travel accommodations. Online travel agencies (OTAs) have already blazed this trail, and have retrained all of us to expect to be able to go online at any hour of the day and make our own assessment of resort accommodations based on pricing, amenities, and proximity to the sites we want to visit.

Consumers no longer accept a vacation product or a website that does not give them access to multiple brands, venues, price points and true comparison shopping. Innovative timeshare resale marketing and timeshare vacation rental products, such as the new ResortRentals.com brand currently in beta launch by VacationOwnership.com, will prove game changing for the timeshare industry … and potentially very disruptive to the OTAs.

ResortRentals.com is being developed to compete with – and out-compete – the existing OTAs. Using the same types of robust search engine optimization (SEO) that SellMyTimeshareNOW.com has used so effectively to capture the demand for rentals and to aggregate the largest inventory of available timeshare rentals in the secondary marketplace, ResortRentals.com will usher in dramatic change in how timeshare resales are rented and are marketed as resale properties.

By offering timeshare rentals at prices no online travel service currently offers or can match and guarantee, owners will no longer be competing with one another in the timeshare rental market. Instead, owners with timeshares to rent or promote as resales will enjoy a platform with a high visibility online presence that positions them to monetize their timeshare, while at the same time promotes the vacation ownership product to a vastly under-marketed segment of the vacationing public.

Instead of seeing online travel agencies as a threat or a competitor, the timeshare industry could soon be seeing the OTAs as the travel-booking product that cleared a path, and in fact, even paved the way for a new and effective way to expose a new generation of vacationers to the amenities and benefits of timeshare resorts and vacation ownership.

With a marketplace in transition, it makes sense that timeshare innovators are moving up as well, cutting ribbons and cutting red tape to offer a vacation product via a platform consumers feel comfortable utilizing.

Thanks to The Resort Trades for permission to reprint this article.

The following look at timeshare resales is from an article published by The Resort Trades (March 2013). In the article we look at how consumers have already changed their feeling about generic or ‘store brand’ products through a generation of familiarization with the concept, thanks primarily to your local grocery store. As you will read, when consumers grow more comfortable with an idea in one application, that comfort level spills over into other buying decisions they will make.

Thank you to The Resort Trades for permission to publish this article here on The Timeshare Authority blog. You can also read this and other timely news about timeshare and vacation ownership in print in the March edition of the magazine or online at The Resort Trades March 2013.

Are resales becoming the ‘store brand’ of timeshare?

by Jason Tremblay

Consumer confidence is higher – or lower – depending upon which report you read. Regardless of whether people believe the economy is trending up or down, the average consumer has, thanks to plenty of practice in recent years, become a price-conscious shopper.

While ten years ago, only 8 percent of shoppers regularly purchased generic or store brands, today, 97 percent of U.S. households buy store brand (also called private label, or generic) products on a regular basis. And it stands to reason that if the average family has grown comfortable with buying generic for the household products they use and the food they feed their children, then they are growing just as comfortable buying timeshare from a reseller as they are from the branded hospitality provider. They understand that the contents inside the can haven’t changed, just the pricing and the packaging.

Shoppers have come to recognize over the years that a store brand is likely to be manufactured by the same company that makes the branded label product. While generic vs. brand is not always an apples to apples comparison, and some branded products are higher in quality than their store brand counterparts, consumers are no longer hesitant to check out the store brand, do their own comparison, and determine for themselves whether they want to buy name brands or go generic.

When it comes to timeshare and vacation ownership sold on the secondary market, the vacation product being offered is often identical to the timeshare a family would purchase from a developer. When timeshare companies hold back certain perks and privileges that do not transfer to the resale buyer, the difference may matter to the consumer, but oftentimes a resale buyer is willing to forego some resort or vacation club membership benefits in order to realize the savings inherent in buying on the secondary market.

Blame the banks, the mortgage companies, elected officials or the swinging pendulum of fate, the causes of the recent recession don’t matter nearly as much as the changes that have ensued in its wake. Consumers have evolved. They have changed dramatically in their buying habits and spending patterns. When it comes to selling vacation ownership to consumers, the timeshare industry can no longer party (or market) like it’s 1999.

Store brand creep

Accepting that store brands and name brands can live compatibly on the shelves together would be a positive step forward for the timeshare industry. But if timeshare buying continues to parallel trends in other buying sectors, living in harmony may not be enough.

In the 1970s, when generic or store brands first began to make their way into the marketplace, they showed up in plain white labels, with black lettering and no photos or graphics on the can. However since that time, creep has occurred. Slowly, without consumers even realizing it has happened, store brands have taken over larger and larger segments of the marketplace.

Not only do generic brands now look as fresh and appealing in their packaging as do their name-brand competitors, but they are being carried by even upscale retailers. For example, the 365™ label is the store brand of the upmarket natural food chain, Whole Foods, and is used for products that range from goat cheese to pesto sauce.

Other retailers are promoting generics in multiple tiers, marketing both a basic store brand and a premier store brand, indicating that the generic concept is strong enough to support competition within its own ranks without risking brand cannibalization.

The popular grocery chain retailer Kroger sees store branding as so significant to its success that the company has launched a five-year plan to revamp its approach to generic products, seeking to eliminate any stigma still associated with them, while concurrently being more responsive to the desires of the consumer. The company has gone so far as to create a fictional consumer named “Maria” so that it can better direct its marketing efforts to appealing precisely to Maria’s shopping patterns and preferences.

The creeping influx of private label products has even transcended the one benefit for which generics were first launched, that of price. For many retailers the store brand or private label product is no longer the cheapest product on the shelf, but now competes in other ways, and remarkably holds its own. The appeal of generic brands extends beyond that of price.

Timeshare resales at the online mall

Price matters, whether it is ten cents saved on a can of tomato soup or thousands of dollars saved by buying a resale timeshare. However, consumers buy timeshares as resales not only because of the money they save, but because they like the simplicity of buying online. Online shoppers find it convenient to research products, reflect on their options, engage current owners in conversation, and generally exercise the types of control that make a person feel that his or her decision to buy has been wisely made.

Online, it is easy to compare prices and amenities from one resort to another or one timeshare company to the next, especially when multiple resort properties are aggregated on a single resale website. This feature of buying secondary market timeshare online is becoming more important all the time. When the world was a smaller place, creating and maintaining brand identity was an easier task.

In a typical day, via print and electronic sources, most people are now exposed to no fewer than 1,000 brand messages with the number often reaching as high as 3,000 to 5,000 brand exposures per person, per day. Yet when asked to recall the most memorable new brand they saw promoted over the past year, more than half of all adults are stumped to recall even one new product by name. Well-organized websites featuring multiple timeshare brands help consumers sort through the brand overload from which we all suffer.

In 1974, many grocers thought that discount-priced black and white label generic products would be short lived, in the same way that 25 years later, bookstore owners saw Amazon.com as a fad that would pass. Secondary market timeshare, with all its positives, and all its problems, isn’t going away.

We, as industry professionals, are challenged to offer new collaborative solutions that developers, resellers and consumers will embrace. The timeshare industry must find its “Maria” and listen carefully to what she really wants. Together, we can take what’s working about the resale market and use it as a platform to strengthen the vacation ownership product.

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Our thanks to The Resort Trades for permission to reprint this article. 

The following article appears in the February 2013 edition of The Resort Trades. You can read the article below, in print, or on the magazine’s website.

This article is republished here with permission of The Resort Trades, a trusted resource since 1986 in the vacation ownership, timeshare, and shared ownership industry and by all who support the industry. The Resort Trades offers display and classified advertising, as well as Trade Member listings, monthly industry news and press releases, global analysis articles, and in-depth interviews with industry professionals and business leaders.

The Gnome Has a Message for You

How OTAs have Changed Vacation Accommodations

Today’s message in vacation accommodations is value. If you doubt it, just ask a gnome, perhaps one paddling by in a kayak.

Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity, Kayak … there’s a long list of players in online travel and although there are distinctions in their services, in general, they all offer some form of travel product search and booking. Their services are fast, available to anyone with Internet access, and empower vacationers and travelers with the sense that they are in control of their accommodations from the room view to the amenities to the price they pay.

Online travel agencies, known as OTAs, have succeeded in not only changing how consumers book vacation accommodations, but have dramatically changed what consumers look for and expect in the booking process. Where once the question asked by a traveler was, “Do you have accommodations?” today the query is, “What’s the best value available?”

The average vacationer visits between three and four OTA sites before making his or her travel decisions. Although the information gleaned from each different website typically varies little in content or price from one site to the next, checking multiple sites is an important part of the user experience – a part the OTAs recognize and indirectly even encourage.

Despite the fact that the OTAs are in competition with one another, they realize that their message of, “low price, low price, low price,” only works if consumers feel they have the latitude to verify the accuracy of this message. Expedia doesn’t mind if you go to Travelocity or Orbitz and run the same search; they know that for most consumers the concern is less about the price they pay and more about fairness. Are they overpaying for something that could be had at a lower price? Searching multiple OTA sites and comparing rates reaffirms for the consumer that he or she is booking his travel at a competitive price and enhances the OTA website experience.

Orbitz tells its website visitors it has travel packages that, “save you moolah,” and that its hotels are, “on sale.” The first search option that Travelocity offers website visitors is one labeled, “Save,” while Expedia highlights its, “Best Price Guarantee.” Online travel agencies know that if they aren’t offering you a cheaper room rate or the capability to bundle your airfare and your hotel room and save, then you have no reason to be their client. With this in mind, they invest billions of advertising dollars reminding the travel marketplace that they offer the lowest price, in the process, implying that hotels, airlines, travel agents, and other traditional resources are overcharging or marking up rates in ways that savvy consumers can avoid.

OTAs not only don’t mind you searching their competitors, in some cases, they don’t even mind you buying from them. Priceline, for example, purchased Kayak in November of 2012, although it continues to operate Kayak as a stand-alone brand. Travelocity is actually a sister site to lastminute.com in Europe and Zuji in Asia, and owns the brands World Choice Travel; IgoUgo, an online travel community and travel-planning resource; and AllHotels, an online hotel reservation site. Orbitz’ brands include CheapTickets, the Away Network in North and South America; ebookers in Europe; and HotelClub and RatestoGo, based in Sydney, Australia, while Hotels.com and Hotwire belong to Expedia.

Everybody wants in on the act

In the U.S., the Internet is the leading source for travel planning information. According to the Traveler’s Road to Decision 2011, a study by thinktravel, Google and other sources, last year, 85 percent of U.S. personal travelers and 78 percent of business travelers used the Internet as their primary travel planning resource.

Where once OTAs were considered a way to augment hotel bookings, many hoteliers are now feeling as if online travel resources are actually cannibalizing their bookings. OTA bookings are growing at a faster rate than traditional hotel bookings are growing, in part because of the aggressive ways OTAs use Google adwords and paid search, bidding on variations of a hotel’s name and keywords. Unhampered by the costs of operating and maintaining resorts, OTAs can dedicate entire marketing budgets to convincing consumers to book online through their company; they can come between a resort and its client so effectively that the vacationer may never even view the resort brand’s website.

In 2012, the U.S. travel industry spent $2.98 billion on digital advertising, a number that is expected to roughly double within the next five years. This is more spending for online advertising, increasing at a faster rate, than online advertising for any other category of goods and services. In an attempt to counterbalance the shrinking margins that have resulted from the success of OTAs, hotels and resorts are looking to different strategies, recognizing that they don’t want to get into adword bidding wars with the OTAs.

Launched in early 2012, Room Key (www.roomkey.com) is intended to help branded hospitality providers regain some of the competitive positioning they’ve lost to the OTAs. As a collaborative venture founded by Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel Group, Room Key offers a clean, simple interface for searching for hotel rooms – or for timeshares.

Ironically, although your search results may yield rentable timeshare units in the mix, and some properties are actually identified as timeshares in their descriptions, you can’t enter the word “timeshare” into your search criteria. Nor can you book a flight, a rental car, or any other component of your trip other than your accommodations when you are using Room Key, a problem some critics speculate will be Room Key’s downfall.

Another approach that may help level the playing field lies in social media. According to research by MDG Advertising, 52 percent of travelers use Facebook for summer vacation inspiration. After their trip is booked, 59 percent of travelers post at least one status update about their upcoming vacation and over 75 percent of travelers share vacation photos through social media. From Facebook to LinkedIn, Twitter, Google , and other growing platforms, social media offers a key relationship building tool for resorts with their clients and prospective clients.

Lastly, no one represents a resort brand better than does the brand itself. No OTA can ever be as accurate, as current, or as personable as your resort can be in representing itself; all an OTA ever has to offer is price. Whether the issue is resort bookings, timeshare sales, timeshare resales, or resort rentals, market value pricing that consumers believe they can trust is always the most powerful playing card anyone in the industry can ever hold.

Valentine’s Day seems like an ideal time to talk about happiness, and in this case, specifically the happiness of your customers and clients.

The following article was published in the January issue of The Resort Trades and looks at why social media is often less about communication and more about triggers in the pleasure centers of the brain.

Our deep appreciation to The Resort Tradesfor permitting us to reprint the article, in its entirety  here on The Timeshare Authority blog.

What’s Making Your Client’s Happy?

by Jason Tremblay

Most of us grew up hearing the admonition, “Never talk to strangers.” You’ve probably passed this wisdom along to your own children. But if you’re still communicating this once-sage bit of information to your offspring, you can stop, because talking to strangers is now what we do. Through blogging, tweeting, posting comments and status updates, we share and over-share the details of our lives with people we know and millions more we will never meet.

Around the world, 62 percent of adults now use social media. Twitter users collectively tweet over a billion times in any 72-hour period, Facebook (the most popular social media platform) has 901 million monthly active users and every month the online population spends the equivalent of 4 million years online. But this article is not about social media… it’s about happiness.

Your clients are online because it makes them happy

People aren’t spending hours of their day online, commenting to and reading the comments of strangers because they have to; they are doing it because it makes them feel good about themselves. Online communication with others is a way to exchange ideas, but the reason it resonates so deeply with us is much more complex and subliminal. According to Dr. Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., director of the Media Psychology Research Center and author of the blog, “Positively Media,” voicing our thoughts online reaffirms to each of us a sense of prerogative, that it is our undeniable right to speak out and be heard.

By connecting with others, we feel a greater sense of group affiliation and identity. We feel validated that people – even those we have never met – share our thoughts, experiences and opinions. Connecting with others online allows us to take risks, to explore new types of friends, and by engaging with strangers in communication, to increase our own sense of self-efficacy. As Dr. Rutledge points out, the Internet is more than a communications tool that makes us happy. Online expression is actually a resource for experiencing a long list of the most common “happiness makers,” including laughing, sharing, seeing the smiles of children and puppies, connecting with others, expressing love, feeling freedom and savoring the sense of autonomy that comes from making our own choices.

How did we overcome our fear of strangers?

Because online expression speaks to our inner selves, stimulating feelings of happiness, we not only feel good about voicing our thoughts to strangers online, we transfer that sense of well-being to the online comments we read from others. Total strangers, whose intelligence or credibility is a complete unknown to us, become a reliable resource because we see them communicating in the same way we are communicating. We feel a bond and a sense that, “this person is like me” and as everyone is sales knows: like attracts like.

Forget the fact that the person commenting about your business or your resort may be a serial killer or sharing his or her thoughts from the psych ward, 70 percent of Internet users say they trust the consumer comments they read online regarding a brand or product. Even more jolting is the reality that 86 percent of Internet users say they don’t pay attention to television commercials or billboards. Instead, they look at search results and consumer reviews to help them make their decisions in choosing products and deciding how to spend their money. Where your company appears in Google rankings or the Bing or Yahoo search results determines your marketing success.

Consumers today may not trust you, but they clearly trust each other. Yet we can’t be too critical of them for being put off by traditional marketing efforts. A recent Harvard Business Review blog post, titled, “Marketing is Dead” cited a 2011 study by Fournaise Marketing Group in which it was revealed that corporate executives don’t like their marketing (or marketing departments) either

•  73 percent of chief operating officers surveyed said that chief marketing officers, in general, lack business credibility and the capability to generate sufficient business growth.
•  72 percent of CEOs say they are tired of providing money in their corporate budgets for marketing initiatives that can’t be guaranteed to increase business.
• 77 percent say they are fed up with all the messaging about brand equity that sounds promising but can’t be linked to any identifiable, trustworthy financial metric.

We could hide our heads in the sand, hoping social media and online consumer-to-consumer relationships lose their marketing leverage. The vacation ownership industry could continue marketing timeshares in the way they have always done. But reliable studies show that brands that engage their customers online and via social media have customers who are more loyal to them than do brands with a minimal online and social media presence. Consumers who are connected online to a brand purchase 20 to 40 percent more from that brand than do consumers who lack an online relationship with the company or brand. And why wouldn’t they? When consumers interact with your brand online they are likely to be relaxing at home or treating themselves to a break within their workday. They have a chocolate bar, a cup of coffee, a soft drink, or perhaps a cold beer or a scotch nearby. When consumers connect with you online, they are already involved in behaviors that are pushing all the right buttons in the pleasure centers of their brain. They are in their happy place before they even begin to process your message – a message that, thanks to the World Wide Web, is available to them 24/7, 365 days a year, anywhere in the world they have Internet access.

Online engagement hasn’t killed traditional marketing; it is becoming today’s traditional marketing. As marketing professionals get better at finding metrics for assessing the success of their online marketing efforts, corporate criticisms and marketing department distrust may improve.

Successful companies will learn to reward both consumers who spend dollars and consumers who influence others to spend dollars. Companies that thrive, including those in the vacation and shared ownership space, will do so by creating as many opportunities as possible for their clients, consumers and prospects to experience their brand via the avenues that already make these consumers happy. And when timeshare consumers get in their happy place, you’ll likely find yourself feeling a whole lot happier, too.