The ladies of the LPGA and its European counterpart, the Ladies European Tour, as well as representatives from other international women’s golf tours, are finally getting the chance to tee it up at St. Andrews in a Major tournament.

Long overdue.

This week, historic St. Andrews is home to the Ricoh Women’s British Open, the first championship at the Old Course ever hosted for professional women golfers. For 154 years, the clubhouse at St. Andrews has carried the sign, “No Dogs. No Women”. Over the years, women have been permitted inside only for social events, despite the fact that women have played there since Mary Queen of Scotts first teed it up on the Old Course.

But as steeped in tradition as St. Andrews is, anyone can book a tee time there and it is an incredible place for a golf and timeshare vacation. Eight of St. Andrews’ ten courses are open to the public. There are wonderful opportunities in Scotland timeshares and certainly no better place for the true golf lover to holiday. You may even recall that some of the old dormitory buildings at St. Andrews University, have recently been converted to fabulous timeshares where Phil Mickelson is among the timeshare owners.

Sell My Timeshare NOW’s favorite PGA Tour veteran, Bobby Cole, who has played St. Andrews many times, including twice in the British Open, offers this advice that will serve the ladies well this weekend, and will also help you when you tee it up on the Scottish links during your St. Andrews timeshare holiday, “You will get a lot of bad bounces and breaks at St. Andrews. Expect that; it happens to everyone who plays there. St. Andrews” Old Course is incredible and brilliantly designed, but extremely different from US courses. With patience and determination you will get your best result.” Cole reminds us of this often-quoted St. Andrews axiom, “Swing easy when it’s breezy,” he says, “don’t try to hit the ball hard into the wind, because this creates more backspin.”

The legalities and your individual rights when you own a timeshare that is rendered unusable because of a catastrophic event will vary from state to state and from timeshare company to timeshare company. And for timeshare vacation property owned outside the United States, your rights, and your ability to enforce them, are often a case by case situation.

Even in the US, if your timeshare is damaged and unusable, you may simply be “out of luck.” You will, however, still be assessed your annual fees, taxes, and other recurring costs, just as if you had enjoyed seven wonderful days of sun and fun in your timeshare unit. If you are making payments on your timeshare, those payments will, of course, also be due. And if your timeshare resort finds it necessary to assess additional fees in order to repair the damages, you will be expected to pay your share of those fees, as well. Special repair fees may be assessed only on the owners of property at the specific resort damaged, or they may be prorated and distributed to all of the owners within the network of that timeshare company.

Another bit of bad news is that the length of time your timeshare is “out of commission” could be much longer than you might expect. A hurricane may be over in a few hours, but the damage it leaves behind can affect timeshare usage for months.

Following the 2004 hurricanes, which hit in August and September, over 60 timeshare resorts in the state of Florida alone were still unfit for occupancy in November. Others were unusable as much as a year later, and in the case of an unprecedented situation, like when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, your timeshare resort could be permanently obliterated.

Post-disaster repairs are not always as simple as bringing in a work crew and putting up a new roof and some drywall. When large geographic areas are affected at once, settlement time with overloaded insurance companies slows to a crawl. Building materials become scarce, and the laborers and craftsmen needed to repair the timeshare units wind up putting customers on waiting lists that can stretch months and months into the future.

Your timeshare resort has an insurance deductible on the property that is essentially like the deductible you probably have on your personal home. That deductible represents what is owed out of pocket by the property owner, or in the case of a timeshare, the property owners, plural. For timeshares built in areas that may be subject to hurricanes, expect the deductible to be as much as 7 or even 10 times higher for hurricane damages than it is for other types of devastation, like a fire, for example.

As much as my two consecutive blog postings of natural disaster “gloom and doom” may be enough to convince you that a timeshare is the last thing you need, the truth is, the odds of your vacation ever being seriously affected by a hurricane are pretty slim. If the abnormally severe hurricane seasons of recent years have made you cautious, then just don’t schedule your timeshare vacation for September.

While hurricane season officially lasts from June 1 to November 30 each year, 19 of the 31 most significant hurricanes in the past 100 years occurred in the month of September, with 9 others on the list happening in either late August or early October. Remember that not all of these hurricanes hit Florida. Several of the hurricanes on the historic worst list hit Texas, a quite a few hit the Carolina coast, and at least 3 on the list made landfall in New England.

And here is one last thought about timeshare ownership and natural disasters. The Real Estate Journal of the Wall Street Journal, www.realestatejournal.com, quoted Howard Nussbaum, who at that of the interview was president of ARDA, as saying, “some people might even consider buying timeshare in affected resorts, figuring that ‘they’ve just been refurbished with insurance money'”.

Just one more reason to buy timeshare resales.

Since I wrote about vacation insurance for timeshare owners in our blog last week, and this week about the disastrous flooding in the US and around the world, I thought I might elaborate a little more on the very real, and very unpredictable matter of natural disasters.

In 2004, our Timeshare Owners Blog tried to keep you updated on the problems one of the worst hurricane seasons on record created for timeshare owners and vacationers. The hurricanes of 2004, primarily Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne, affected more than 25 percent of the timeshare resorts in the US.

The impact ranged from the relatively minor inconvenience of temporary loss of telephone service and or electricity, to total devastation of the timeshare resort. The fact that so many timeshares—one in four in the United States—were effected, occurred primarily because Florida leads the nation in both the number of timeshare resorts within the state as well as the number of hurricane hits. Now factor in South Carolina and Texas, each with a significant number of both timeshares and hurricanes, and you quickly see the problem.

First, let’s deal with some good rules to follow regarding hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, and other types of natural disasters. If you are on holiday and there is a consideration that any of these or other adversities could affect the area in which you are vacationing, take a few simple precautions.

1. Keep your gas tank filled. A sudden surge of people evacuating an area not only clogs the highways but can deplete local gas supplies. In the event of loss of electricity, the gas pumps won’t work anyway.
2. Keep extra cash on hand. During an emergency, there may be no one available to cash your travelers checks and automatic teller machines can run out of cash quickly. Like gas pumps ATM’s stop working when the power goes out.
3. Whether it is your personal car or a rental car, if you are planning to drive it out of the area, put at least a few bottles of water and some granola bars in it. Don’t expect restaurants to be open along evacuation routes. Even if some are, the lines may be so long that you decide it is best to just keep on truckin’.



4. Lastly, and this is the most important tip of all, if you are in an area where the authorities declare mandatory evacuation—LEAVE. Natural disasters are not exciting, exhilarating, or something to tell the grandchildren. Once you have been advised by the authorities to leave, no one will come rescue you if you choose to stay. Emergency personnel are not expected to put their lives on the line for people who do not follow mandatory evacuation orders. During a hurricane, for example, once mandatory evac orders are issued, police officers often go to the area, and ask all those who have chosen to ride out the storm to provide the contact information for their next of kin. They want to know where, after the storm has passed, they should ship your body, if they are able to recover it.

With those sobering thoughts out of the way, in tomorrow’s blog posting we will look more specifically at the way natural disasters affect your timeshare ownership.

As floodwaters subside in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, I want to take this opportunity to express our compassion for all the people who have been affected by this devastation to property, loss of livelihood, and most tragically, loss of lives.

If you’ve never been through a flood, it can be hard to imagine the destructive power of the moving water, how quickly it can rise, and how filthy flood waters really are. A raging current of water ceases to be rain water or even river water, and becomes a moving torrent of sewage, carrying with it garbage and wastes of all kinds, animals that have drowned, dangerous floating or submerged debris, and in most cases, snakes, rats, and a host of vermin.

When the waters finally go down, what is left is nasty and bloated beyond comprehension. My heart breaks for everyone who is facing this tragedy. Even sadder, because flood insurance is only required of properties in certain areas, the vast majority of the people affected by the flooding will have no insurance coverage to fall back on.

Lest we think that our problems in the US are singular, a brief search of the news reminds us that, in recent weeks, thousands of farmers in the Orissa district of India have lost their crops due to flooding. Over all, more than 1.5 million residents along or near the Bay of Bengal have been impacted by flash flooding, including the collapse of thousand of mud homes. In Norway, floodwaters have polluted drinking waters for hundreds of residents. Seasonal flooding in the Sudan of Africa has been much worse than usual this year, and thousands are homeless as both the Nile and the Al-Gash rivers have overflowed their banks.

Residents near Victoria, Australia, have recently faced some of the worst flooding in that area’s history, as trees are down and roads are closed by the high waters. In the North Cornwall area of England, flash flooding has collapsed buildings and forced the evacuation of approximately 1000 residents. In Japan, Typhoon Man-Yi has created massive flooding, loss of homes, and again, loss of life. And in China, with its burgeoning population, millions have been affected by flooding this summer, including the deaths, according to some resources, of nearly 400 people.

Sadly, in my accounts of this summer’s flooding, I may have omitted areas I should have mentioned, and I apologize. We’ve had our own experiences with floodwaters here in Dover, NH at our Sell My Timeshare NOW offices and our hearts go out to everyone around the globe who is now dealing with flooding or its aftermath. If you can do anything to help someone whose life has been forever changed by floodwaters, please do. If you don’t know where to start, remember there is always the Disaster Relief Fund of the American Red Cross.

1-800-RED CROSS

For an interesting take on the flooding problems in Great Britian, read Peter Black’s blog.

To learn more about the National Flood Insurance Program visit their website at http://www.floodsmart.gov/floodsmart/pages/index.jsp

And if you have any updates on timeshares in the areas affected by the flooding, please share it with us by leaving your comments.