The long-awaited 52-story Westgate residential, vacation ownership, and timeshare resort, PH Towers at Planet Hollywood, officially opened this week. Grand opening of the 1,201-room resort began with room availability to timeshare owners and will be followed on December 28 by rooms available to the general public.

The resort’s timeshare units account for approximately 20 percent of the total number of rooms at the property and include studio timeshare units, and one and two bedroom timeshare units. Many feature dramatic city views with floor to ceiling windows, marble accented bathrooms, spa tubs, and other luxury amenities. But perhaps the real draw of Las Vegas timeshare at the PH Towers is its location at the heart of the Vegas Strip, on four acres next to the Miracle Mile Shops. At build out, you’ll find some 170 specialty stores and thirty restaurants in what Westgate timeshares describes as “retail bliss” for the “semipro shopper”.

The PH Towers at Planet Hollywood Resort and Las Vegas Timeshare is a partnership development between Planet Hollywood Resort and Westgate timeshare. In opening the PH Towers, more than 800 hospitality professionals have been hired.

The South Florida Business Journal reports that research from Deloitte has found, “45 percent of U.S. consumers planned to take a leisure trip involving an overnight stay at a hotel, motel or timeshare from the beginning of Thanksgiving week through March.”

photo credit: Michal Zacharzewski SXC

In the state of Florida alone, AAA estimates that 2.1 million Floridians will be traveling during this Thanksgiving holiday, marking a 3 percent increase over Thanksgiving travel last year. Across the country, as many as 38 million people will travel at least 50 miles (or more) this Thanksgiving holiday weekend—a nearly one and a half percent increase over 2008.

Kevin Bakewell, senior vice president of AAA Auto Club South says, “We take the projected increase in travelers as a sign that economic recovery may finally be taking root and we believe many Americans certainly share the same hope.”

Your Drive-To Timeshare Resale or Timeshare Rental Destination

While many of us are traveling this Thanksgiving, more of us are driving vs. flying. With increasing costs to fly, add-on charges for luggage and other services, and fewer flights translating to more delays, only 6 percent of Thanksgiving travelers will fly, which is a drop of a staggering 62 percent since 2000.

Thank goodness, the flexibility of timeshare exchange and timeshare rentals makes it easy to plan a drive-to vacation. And if you don’t already own a timeshare that is conveniently located so that travel time doesn’t become the most important aspect of the flight, now’s a great time to be looking at the many opportunities in timeshare resales.

We deliver so much timeshare news and current events here on The Timeshare Authority, it becomes easy to forget that many of the people who are interested in buying timeshare or a timeshare rental are new to the world of timesharing. They may not “speak the language” that the rest of us have all grown accustomed to understanding.

So let’s use today’s blog and talk about some of the industry jargon that is understandably confusing to people who haven’t encountered it before:

• Fixed Week: These are seven-day increments of timeshare that you own at a home resort. Your fixed week of timeshare ownership is usually identified by a number, such as, “Week 10”. When you own a fixed week of timeshare, you are guaranteed that vacation week every year. But you are not required to stick with it; you can still typically use it as a timeshare exchange.
• Floating Week: A floating week gives you the right to one week of timeshare that usually falls within a season of a specified value. RCI (Resort Condominiums International) for example, uses color coded seasons of red, white, and blue with red representing the highest demand season. Use of a floating week is always based on availability and you must go through the steps required by your resort or exchange company to use it as a timeshare exchange. Points based timeshare is always floating timeshare ownership.
• Space banking: When you save or ‘bank’ your timeshare into a collective of other available timeshare weeks or units, you are space banking it for future use.
• Lock-out: A lock out or lock off timeshare unit is one that can be subdivided and each section rented separately.
• Gold Crown Resort: A Gold Crown timeshare resort is a connotation applied by RCI to identify timeshare properties of the highest standards.

Buying, renting, or selling timeshare is not a complicated process (at least it shouldn’t be) and enjoying timeshare is certainly not hard to do. But the industry has developed some specific terminology and you will be better prepared to make decisions and make plans if you understand the language.

To learn more about the no doubletalk approach to timeshares, check out the Sell My Timeshare NOW Timeshare Glossary.

Last week, ARDA’s vacation website, www.vacationbetter.org announced the winners of this year’s “Bring Your Vacation to Life Contest.”

Each year this photo, essay, and video competition is announced in conjunction with the National Travel and Tourism Week in May. Entrants are asked to share a memory of a timeshare vacation that contributed to their enjoyment of life or impacted their family or their health.

This year’s winners received an American Express gift card.

• Sally Lessig received first place for her photo, “Al Relaxing” and the accompanying story, “Thru the Years.”
• Alexis MacDonald received second place for her photo, “Lexie & Dan Love Myrtle Beach.”
• Tracy Dunn received second place for her photo, “For My Next Act.”

Follow this link to read Sally’s story about a lifetime of timeshare vacations at the Beach House Golf and Racket Club in Myrtle Beach.

And remember, you aren’t limited to just reading about the great timeshare vacations other people enjoy. The competitive prices of timeshare resales and timeshare rentals make affordable vacations an option even for travelers on a limited budget.

Flu season is almost here, only this year it includes the added concern of H1-N1 flu, the name we are supposed to now use instead of swine flu so we won’t offend the pigs or create a bad marketing image for the pork industry. (Okay, fair enough)

It is natural to wonder whether it is a good idea to travel at all with concerns so high about exposure to illness. But before you cancel your timeshare vacation, you might consider just taking some preventative measures to improve the odds that you stay healthy, especially if your vacation is planned for a timeshare you already own (and therefore have already paid for) or you’ve arranged a great deal on a timeshare rental.

And while the threat of flu exposure may give you pause to rethink your timeshare vacation plans, the overall health benefits of vacation and relaxation time probably outweigh the risk of coming down with a bug. According to ARDA, the American Resort Development Association, at their website www.vacationbetter.org, “Men who don’t vacation regularly are 32 percent more likely to die of heart attacks; women are 50 percent more likely.” This single fact alone is an eye-opener to the fact that vacation time is critical, even if it means washing our hands a few extra times along the way.

Simple Steps to Increase the Odds of Staying Healthy During Your Timeshare Vacation

Your timeshare unit should be clean when you arrive, and if for any reason it is not, contact the timeshare management immediately to ensure that you are either switched to a different unit, if one is available, or that housekeeping takes care of your concerns.

But even in the cleanest of timeshare resorts, there are little steps you can take to improve your chances of staying healthy during your timeshare vacation.

1. Worry less about the sink and toilet and more about items such as the on-off buttons on light fixtures. Take along some sanitary disposable wipes and wipe down doorknobs, telephones, light switches, the refrigerator and microwave door handles, salt and pepper shakers, and other places that people frequently handle but housekeeping is more likely to miss in clean-up. This is not major cleaning; you only need to do this once upon first entering your timeshare condo or unit.
2. Some timeshare vacationers routinely load the dishwasher with all washable kitchen items and run them through the hottest or longest washing cycle before they use anything.
3. Deal with the most unsanitary item(s) in the room … the TV and video remotes. Since you can’t bathe the remotes in disinfectant, try taking a zip-closure sandwich bag turned inside out, picking up the remote and then pulling the bag over it, and ‘zipping’ it closed. Great trick, super simple, and you can still work the remote just fine right through the bag.
4. Put a pair of thongs or other slip-on shoes inside the front door, for each family member. Leave outside shoes on a newspaper inside your timeshare, and wear the clean thongs inside the unit. This way, you won’t be bringing more outside germs into your timeshare nor will you be walking around barefoot inside the unit.
5. Author L. A. Robinson (“Keeping Germs at Bay“) suggests a bottle of alcohol for cleaning up tubs and toilets. It is cheap, easy to splash around, safe for most surfaces and you can pick up a small bottle anywhere.
6. And finally, wash your hands. You can’t hear this enough or do it too much. Buy a handful of those little bottles of waterless liquid soap and make it a game with your kids to use the stuff liberally and often.

Finally, if you do get sick, seek medical attention promptly. And if you are traveling outside the US, and you or a family member becomes seriously ill, contact the embassy or consulate for that country. The Department of State Diplomacy in Action website is www.usembassy.gov/

To contact this agency by phone from the US or Canada call: 888-407-4747. From outside the US call: 00-1-202-501-4444.

We’ve never made it a secret. Our approach to getting timeshare sellers and timeshare renters the best possible visibility on the World Wide Web for their advertised timeshare property has involved using the best strategies of internet marketing. Sell My Timeshare NOW works to stay on the cutting edge of internet and search engine optimization, so that when you let us advertise your timeshare resale or timeshare rental, you have maximum internet visibility to a marketplace of interested timeshare buyers and timeshare renters.

But the internet continues to change, transforming itself and how people use it. As these changes happen, we keep expanding our offerings to you so that you will always have a timely and reliable resource for the newest and most comprehensive timeshare information. The Timeshare Authority blog has been a frontrunner in timeshare industry communication for almost five years. No one else has a timeshare news and information update, published over 300 times per year, except here at The Timeshare Authority blog.

Timeshare News from a Source You Can Trust: Sell My Timeshare NOW on Twitter

We are also tweeting to you on three corporate accounts: @JasonTremblay_; @VacationHotDeal; and @SteveLuba. Twitter is a fun, dynamic medium of communication and we hope you will sign up to follow our tweets and that you will retweet our messages.

The Sell My Timeshare NOW Forum

The SellMyTimeshareNOW Forum is a great place to exchange ideas with other timeshare owners or ask questions and leave comments. Soon we’ll be adding a Facebook fan site as another way to expand our social media presence and provide more formats of communication for timeshare buyers, sellers, renters, owners, and everyone involved in the timeshare industry or interested in timesharing.

Web 2.0 and the surge in social media is exciting. It means that advertising and marketing is no longer industry driven, but is instead defined, and constantly redefined — as it should be — by the consumers who use it.

Follow this link to read the Sell My Timeshare NOW press release, Sell My Timeshare NOW Uses Social Media Marketing to Fill an Important Need among Timeshare Vacationers

Director of Communications Steve Luba gives a wrap-up of the latest happenings in the industry.

 

 Standard Podcast [3:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last week, Sell My Timeshare NOW released the HOT 100 List for timeshare resales and timeshare rentals. Let’s take a closer look at some of the trends the report reveals, especially about the HOTTEST 10 timeshare resorts – those popular ten at the very top of the list.

For the second consecutive year, WorldMark by Wyndham timeshares rank number 1 in the number of offers received to buy or rent. These timeshares are multi-destination ownership, meaning that your WorldMark by Wyndham timeshare gives you a choice of nearly 60 luxurious timeshare resorts in the US (including Hawaii), Mexico, Canada, and Fiji.

Marriott timeshare (Marriott Vacation Club International) claimed four spots on the HOTTEST 10 list. Marriott’s Aruba Surf Club in Palm Beach, Aruba was number 2; Marriott’s Newport Coast Villas, Newport Coast, California was number 3; Marriott’s Grande Vista, Orlando, Florida was number 8; and Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club, Maui, Hawaii was number 9.

One of the few changes in the HOT 100 List, this year over last year, is that Marriott’s Grande Vista in Orlando is new to the HOTTEST 10, while Marriott’s Ko Olina Beach Club in Oahu, Hawaii, was number 10 on last year’s list but slipped to number 11 on this year’s list.

By geographic destination, Orlando timeshare dominated, including the Marriott property already mentioned, and two other popular Orlando timeshare resorts: Orange Lake’s West Village, which ranked number 6, and Hilton Grand Vacations Club at SeaWorld International Centerdo, new to the list at number 10.

Rounding out the HOTTEST 10 timeshare resales are: the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort Villas in Maui, Hawaii, number 4 on the list, the Harborside Resort at Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas, number 5 on the list, and the always popular Manhattan Club, in New York City, moving up from last year’s number 9, to be number 7 on this year’s list.

For the ten resorts making the HOTTEST 10 List, Sell My Timeshare NOW received 23,317 offers to buy or rent in 2008.

Click here to view the entire HOT 100 List for Sell My Timeshare NOW timeshare resales and timeshare rentals.

And if you are interested in comparisons, this link will take you to information about last year’s HOT 100 List: Sell My Timeshare NOW Releases HOT 100 List for 2008.

Sell My Timeshare NOW has released its annual HOT 100 List, which shows the top 100 timeshare resales and timeshare rentals advertised on www.sellmytimesharenow.com. The list is based on the number of inbound offers to buy or rent timeshare.

This year’s HOT 100 List reveals some interesting trends, most notably a 56 percent increase in the number of offers to buy or rent timeshare on the HOT 100 List, compared to the previous year. The total number of offers for the HOT 100 List was 70,700.

The report also shows remarkable consistency from last year to this year in the timeshare resale and timeshare rental resort properties that make the top of the HOT 100 List — those on the Top 10. The timeshare resorts that made the Top 10 received 23,317 offers to buy or rent.

Here’s the HOTTEST Timeshares of the HOT 100, the Top 10:

• WorldMark by Wyndham, Multi-Destination Resorts (Number 1 for the second year in a row.)
• Marriott’s Aruba Surf Club, Palm Beach, Aruba
• Marriott’s Newport Coast Villas, Newport Coast, California
• Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort Villas, Maui, Hawaii
• Harborside Resort at Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas
• Orange Lake’s West Village, Orlando, Florida
• Manhattan Club, New York, New York.
• Marriott’s Grande Vista, Orlando, Florida
• Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club, Maui, Hawaii
• Hilton Grand Vacations Club at SeaWorld International Center, Orlando, Florida

The full report on all 100 HOT timeshare resales and timeshare rentals is available here: Sell MyTimeshare NOW HOT 100 List, and our official press release is available here: Timeshare Resales Offers up 56 Percent on HOT 100 List as Americans Seek Vacation Savings

Many states are looking at raising hotel taxes to help offset budget cuts. Director of Communications Steve Luba discusses the issue.

 

 Standard Podcast [2:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download