The Resort Trades

The Resort Trades is a reliable, insightful, and often provocative resource for news about the timeshare industry and vacation and timeshare ownership. We are deeply appreciative of their permission to share this article, which originally appeared in the June issue of The Resort Trades.

The article was written by Jason Tremblay and is reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

The Six Myths of Timeshare Ownership: A Hostage Situation

by Jason Tremblay

Last year I had the opportunity to meet author Morey Stettner through an interview and an article he was writing for the Portsmouth Herald. Morey is the author of a number of excellent business books, most dealing with the topic of management.

But one of his books specifically, “Skills for New Managers,” (©2000, McGraw-Hill) not only offers excellent wisdom for workers making the transition to management positions, but provides parallel insights for all of us in timeshare and vacation ownership sales, marketing, and resort management. It seems that the verities of dealing with employees are remarkably similar to the truths about dealing with timeshare buyers, sellers, guests, and owners.

Morey looks at the misconceptions new managers often bring to their roles in a chapter he titles, “Piercing Six Myths of Management.” With his permission, I’ve refocused these myths to also address the business-to-consumer relationship between the timeshare industry and its market.

Myth 1: You must call all the shots

“Employees,” Morey points out, “make an average of 100 unsupervised decisions a day.” He adds, “Don’t believe for a second that just because you’re a manager, you’re in charge of everything.”

But if employees make an average of 100 unsupervised decisions a day, timeshare owners and guests must collectively make thousands of decisions daily regarding how they will use (and sometimes misuse) their timeshares and the benefits of vacation ownership. Much like business managers trying to control their staffs, timeshare companies sometimes find that trying to micromanage the ownership experience feels like herding cats.

What’s the solution? For business managers, getting in the trenches and demonstrating by example is one way to guide staff members on how a manager would like a task accomplished. For timeshare companies, the answer to this dilemma is much the same. Look at timeshare ownership, points, and usage guidelines. Evaluate whether they are logical and clear from the perspective of an owner or someone new to timeshare.

Go on your own website and explore the user experience. Click the links, follow the instructions, and see how your timeshare product looks through the eyes of owners and prospective buyers.

The fact that so many timeshare owners don’t understand the product they own and miss out on many of their benefits, is a problem that can only be blamed on timeshare ownership stipulations that are unnecessarily complex. Vacationing and everything about it is supposed to be fun and easy.

Myth 2: You can’t trust anyone

In “Skills for New Managers,” Stettner points out the destructive management myth that perpetuates the idea, “it is foolish to trust employees.” But seasoned management personnel know that trust is important, recognizing that having faith in your team is often the best way to earn their trust in return.

In timeshares and vacation ownership, we need to learn to trust consumers when their instincts tell them they can’t afford to buy a timeshare or upgrade their ownership. Twisting someone’s arm in order to make a sale is never a good basis for starting a relationship. Likewise, we must trust owners when they tell us they can no longer afford their timeshares or that they have experienced life events that make it impossible for them to continue to use their vacation ownership. No product should come with a life sentence attached to it.

Myth 3: You must remain objective at all times

This myth is simple to bust. No one ever builds a long-term relationship with an automaton. Whether we are managing a team, responding to owners at a resort, or working with timeshare buyers and sellers, stoic and inflexible rarely serves any of us well. We need to be warm, personable, and human, even when it means bending the rules to serve the situation.

Myth 4: You must defend your staff

Whether it’s workers on a team, at a resort, or on a timeshare sales and marketing staff, if there’s a breakdown, we are obligated to step up and honor our client or customer’s position. This is not a matter of throwing employees, resorts, or brands under the bus. But when our team, our company, or the timeshare product itself is off base, it’s incumbent upon us to do everything within our power to make things right. Every time we fail to do this and a client or potential client walks away dissatisfied, we have launched a grass-roots marketing campaign with an anti-timeshare message.

Myth 5: You cannot back down

No company has ever created policies and protocols that are unimpeachable. While millions of timeshare owners say they are satisfied with their timeshare ownership, far too many others make it clear they are frustrated with points and membership systems that are unnecessarily complex, ownership they can’t get out of, and fees they can’t budget for in today’s challenging economy. If aspects of the timeshare product beg to be reinvented, let’s reinvent them!

Myth 6: You’re the best teacher

The best teachers are always those who teach in the way the student is receptive to learn. If the vacation ownership industry was effectively communicating with owners and with the marketplace, we would stop reading weekly headlines about the fraud, failure, and deception of timeshare.

Either timeshare is a bad purchase, as so many financial advisers suggest, or we, individually and collectively, are failing in communicating the real benefits of timeshare. The timeshare industry is not a victim under senseless attack by the media. We are teachers who are missing the mark in articulating the value proposition of our product in a way the marketplace understands.

As Morey Stettner points out in his frank look at the management relationship, “You’re one of many sources of insight for your employees.” The same is true for all of us in the business of timeshare.

We are a source of insight and understanding for timeshare owners, buyers, sellers, and renters. When our messaging is unclear or we all sing out of different songbooks, then owners and those who might be owners tune us out and listen to timeshare’s critics, whose words seem to resonate with more clarity.

Morey Stettner coaches new managers to listen to their own words and then ask themselves three questions:

• Did I say what I wanted to say?
• Did I use words and phrases that my employees will understand?
• Did I communicate clearly and concisely?

These are three great questions for us to ask ourselves. Vacation ownership has a tremendous value proposition to offer. But until we get past the myths that dog us within the industry, we may never be able to “communicate clearly and concisely,” breaking down the misconceptions that hold our industry hostage.

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Thank you again, Resort Trades for your permission to share this article. 

The following article appeared in The Resort Trades— your source for news on timeshares and the vacation ownership industry.  You will find the article on The Resort Trades website and it print in the June issue. The Timeshare Authority blog thanks The Resort Trades for permission to reprint the article here.

Can Timeshares Provide Both the Lean Back and the Lean Forward Experience?

by Jason Tremblay

The timeshare industry has long believed that hotels are its primary competition for the vacationer’s dollar, with privately owned or rented vacation homes as a distant second. But change is in the works; change that is rooted in generational shift and fed by Internet technology.

Today’s timeshares – and perhaps more importantly, tomorrow’s timeshares – will compete with companies and services that may not even be on your radar yet as competitors. P2P (peer-to-peer) travel accommodations are growing in popularity and market position.

With consumer confidence in government, big business, and the economy low and distrust of these institutions high, the door is wide open for vacation experiences that feel different, authentic, and enable the consumer to bypass the megacorporations and deal with an individual.

Names you know, such as HomeAway with more than 700,000 vacation home rentals in its inventory, and Couchsurfing with its 5 million members, are becoming more and more visible and disruptive.

At the same time, names you may have never heard before, including Airbnb, with 300,000 vacation rental listings and Wimdu at half that size but growing, are only two of the many contenders out there that are ready, willing, and able to steal clients away from timeshare.

What P2P services lack in resort-style amenities and brand recognition, they make up for in qualities such as authenticity, price and the potential to offer a fresh experience. As Vipin Goyal, co-founder and CEO of SideTour, an online marketplace for experiences that help you explore major cities, explains, “P2P travel is not for people who want to lean back, it’s a lean-forward experience.”

Depending upon your level of tech-sophistication and perhaps your age, you may see technology as a tool you utilize to your benefit. But if you have grown up with technology integrated into your life, you don’t see technology as a tool; you probably don’t see it at all.

For a large and growing portion of today’s adult population, technology is little different from the air we breathe. It’s not a “thing” we harness; it is an assimilated, cohesive part of our world.

Crowdsourcing and P2P lending quietly and effectively are encroaching on banking, loan companies, and traditional forms of funding, startup, and debt relief in a playing field where the lines between personal finance and business finance are increasingly blurred.

Last month, Amazon bought a $125-million stake from investors in the P2Pcredit site, Lending Club, which Forbes Magazines describes as a website that “cuts out banks by matching lenders with borrowers, offering a better spread between interest and savings rates.”

The music industry could not thwart or contain P2P sharing of music, just as the publishing industry could not stop the dramatic change created by self-publishing, eBook reader devices, and print-on-demand technology. Thinking you can beat this new-world way of doing business is a self-destructive strategy. What did the music industry gain by suing individual high school and college students for downloading songs?

The timeshare industry need not try to fight the trend toward the P2P business model. Peer-2-peer models reflect the changing culture. In a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. and British adults, 17 percent of respondents over the age of 48 said they would likely use a service that allows them to rent a space, such as an apartment, home, or a room in a home for vacation or travel purposes.

Move to the age group 35 to 47, and that percentage more than doubles, while among the under age 34 group of adults taking the survey, the number hits 46 percent. And why wouldn’t it, when you realize that across the board, in all age groups, 55 percent of adults surveyed said they would put their trust in “an individual over a big corporation any day.”

The timeshare business model has room to change. The incorporation of technology platforms into services has to stop being a “gadget” for some owners and renters and seamlessly become part of the air all owners and renters breathe. Timeshares have to stop selling to people and start making offers so compelling and products so flexible and affordable that people can’t help but choose vacation ownership and timeshare rentals. Above all else, we have to slay the timeshare resale dragon so it stops tormenting current owners and lurking in the shadows to taunt prospective buyers.

Marriott Hotels is already partnering with the P2P workspace sharing platform LiquidSpace to offer conference and meeting rooms in Marriott properties across the country. For the Marriott corporation, the endeavor expands opportunities to benefit from the use of space that is otherwise underutilized.

Peggy Roe, Marriott Hotels vice president of global operations services says, “As we have done work with customers, associates and planners, [the meeting space] is not an industry that has experienced a lot of innovation…Hotels really haven’t touched the meeting space as an industry.”

With a strategy of space-on-demand, 36 Marriott properties now are being offered through the LiquidSpace platform to test the option of last-minute work or meeting space as a desirable alternative to meeting in your hotel room, the hotel lobby or the restaurant.

Some spaces are even offered at no cost. It’s not rocket science, but it does offer a way for one hotel brand to partner with a P2P platform and in so doing, extend its services and make itself more flexible and more responsive to its clients.

Despite growing consumer interest in P2P offerings, timeshare doesn’t have to turn itself into a clone. Vacation ownership needs only to acknowledge the P2P model as a valid and credible way of serving clients, to live in harmony with it and to learn from it as is applicable in a changing marketplace.

In one regard, the P2P timeshare model already exists; it’s called by-owner timeshare resale and rental. Instead of trying to squelch it, the timeshare industry needs to help validate it.

Peer-2-peer accommodations will only compete with timeshares to the degree the shared ownership industry is willing to permit. In the end, the novelty of staying in a stranger’s home is always counterbalanced by the “what ifs.” What if the place I rent doesn’t look like the photo or match the description? What if I am staying in a private rental and I need assistance in the form of maintenance, security or other services? What if this peer takes my money and I get nothing in return?

Timeshare can play to its strengths. Consistency of service and quality accommodations augmented by desirable resort amenities are hard to compete against. If the timeshare industry steps up its game with easier online booking, greater Internet visibility, more customizable experiences and added services that are unique and distinctive, then the concept of vacation ownership and rental is reinvented.

And why would we ever shy away from reinventing ourselves with the best of the old and the most exciting of the new? Yes, timeshares can provide both the lean back and the lean forward experience!

Resort Trades, a true news journal of the timeshare and vacation ownership  industry, will publish a Special Edition August issue.

Resort Trades publisher Tim Wilson explains, “We are currently engaged in an enormous research project to identify and list every single company providing goods and services to the timeshare industry, today.”

In the publication’s August 2013 issue, Resort Trades will list the company name and anniversary date of every vendor, management company and other entity currently doing business with timeshare resorts.

Wilson says, “It’s a lot of work, but we think this will be one issue every reader will want to keep on their shelf all year long. Vendors will be listed according to categories, so if a resort professional has a specific need, they will be able to read a comprehensive list of every provider offering them a solution, regardless of whether they have ever been advertisers.”

In April of this year Resort Trades was redesigned to enhance its readability and user appeal as the timeshare and vacation ownership industry’s most widely-read news journal. Since 1987 has always been to provide current and relevant information directly to resort personnel.

“To ensure they are properly listed, vendors and suppliers should contact (931) 484-4136 or [email protected],” says Resort Trades Sales Executive John Bunch. “Our goal is to fairly list every single company as accurately as possible. Of course, advertisers will be given additional recognition and space to discuss their specific goods and services.”

The publication was redesigned in April for greater readability as the industry’s most widely-read news journal. Resort Trades is published in a tabloid format because it is the Business News Journal of the timeshare industry.

The mission of the Resort Trades is: “Provide readers with unbiased and supportive information that will contribute to their knowledge and be of benefit to them as they seek to provide their owners and guests with perfect vacations.”

This article was previously published in The Resort Trades and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.

Before you read the article, consider this, “Did you grow up with a computer in your home or in your classroom?” If the answer is “No” then you may need to reconsider how many of today and tomorrow’s timeshare owners have had computers seamlessly integrated into their lives since childhood… you may also want to reconsider if the paths you have offered to timeshare ownership in the past are relevant to today’s potential buyers.

Timeshare Ownership: You are cordially invited to attend the wedding of timeshare and its future

by Jason Tremblay

At ARDA World 2013, you had the opportunity to hear keynote speaker Don Tapscott discussing the impact of information technology on today’s business world. His theories, outlined in his books, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” and “Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet,” put forth innovative and inevitable ideas about doors that are opening (and others that are closing) as information technology, the Internet and the World Wide Web redefine almost everything about how we interact with the world around us.

Yet if you read Tapscott’s books, Growing Up Digital: “The Rise of the Net Generation” (1999) and “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World” (2008) you will recognize that the real concern is not how the Internet is changing our lives, but how it has already changed the lives of a new generation.

The Net Generation (a term coined by Tapscott) currently ranges in age from 16 to 30-plus, perhaps older as the last age group of American consumers to grow up without access to computers in their classrooms is now over 40 years old. As Tapscott points out, “… the Net Generation has arrived.” The handwriting on the wall appears digitally via an app from your smart phone and clearly points out that, for the vacation ownership industry, the Net Generation is our future, our present, and our only hope.

What makes the Net Generation distinctive

Baby Boomers have been such a large and vocal group for so long it’s almost difficult for many of us in business to think about marketing and selling vacation ownership products to other types of consumers. But if we’ve learned anything from recent presidential elections it should be that young America is a force to acknowledge, creating change from the workplace to the marketplace.

While many of us speak of technology as if it is a “thing” with which we interact, for the Net Generation technology is seamless and invisible. Describing it as being “like the air” for the Net Gen, Tapscott says it is no more a marvel than is a refrigerator or a television.

But here’s one key difference: we watch television passively, while the generation that has grown up with the Internet is never passive in their online experience. Instead, they are searching, seeking, reading, writing, curating, authenticating, collaborating, organizing, and even strategizing. As Tapscott points out, “They do not just observe; they participate.”

Whether we attempt to sell timeshare, vacation club memberships, timeshare exchange memberships, or any other related vacation ownership and vacation rental product or service, we have to recognize that with each passing year, our target market will become less and less willing to “be sold to.”

Consumers who have either grown up with information technology or who have embraced it and integrated it into their lives, will not sit through sales presentations and they will be inherently skeptical of mini vacations as a sales tool.

Tapscott identifies eight characteristics that he says differentiate the Net Generation from Boomers, and if he’s correct, they are all attributes that come into play in the process of selling vacation ownership products. These eight characteristics are:

1. Expects freedom of choice
2. Wants customized products, solutions, and lifestyles
3. Are natural collaborators, who enjoy a conversation, not a lecture
4. Will scrutinize you and your organization
5. Insists on integrity
6. Wants to have fun in all things, including work and school (and timesharing!)
7. Sees speed as normal
8.  Accepts innovation as a part of life (and therefore, probably expects innovation as part of timeshare ownership)

I now pronounce you owner and timeshare … you may kiss the bride!

As of this past Valentine’s Day, according to Doug Brockwell, a contributor for yahoo.com, 17 percent of people meet their spouse online. In 2012, 40 million people used online dating, and the Internet is now the second-most popular way for dating couples to connect, surpassed only by introductions from friends. If 40 million people are willing to search for a life companion online, why would any of us think that consumers would be hesitant to research, select and then rent or buy timeshare over the internet?

But what will it actually take to get a new breed of consumer down the aisle with vacation ownership?

The answer lies in the eight ways that the Net Gens are distinctive from previous timeshare buyers. No matter how we package it, none of us will be able to sell today’s vacation ownership products (as they currently exist) to the next wave of buyers. Instead, timeshare will have to become:

1. Extremely flexible
2. Customizable to suit distinctive vacationing needs and preferences
3. A product designed based on feedback from those who will actually be utilizing it, such as Ikea and Marriott have done in partnering on the new Moxy Hotel chain being built in Europe to target the younger market
4. Extremely transparent, capable of withstanding scrutiny
5.  Integrity-based on all levels including sales, marketing, and resales options
6. Fun to own, but also fun to shop for and buy, and if not fun to resell, at least not painful to resell
7. Prepared to change as quickly and as often as its new, younger owners will expect it to change
8. Innovative in concept, design and service

Perhaps it wasn’t the economy, stupid

During former President Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, political strategist James Carville posted a sign on Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters that included the phrase, “the economy, stupid.” The statement was intended to help keep campaign messaging on track but it seeped into the media and took on a life of its own.

Since 2008, the vacation ownership industry has responded, “the economy,” whenever queried about declining sales of timeshare ownerships. Possibly, we have used the wrong word. If it turns out the answer should have been, “the Internet,” then we can celebrate the revelation.

While a faltering global economy is a monumental challenge to overcome, one industry’s miscue in responding to a shifting paradigm in consumer profiles is completely within our grasp to rectify. The timeshare industry is rich with far too many bright and clever strategists to be anything but smart about its direction for the future.

The Timeshare Authority expresses its sincere appreciation to The Resort Trades for permission to publish this article. You will find this full article, and other news from the timeshare ownership industry in each issue of The Resort Trades, available online and in print. We would also like to thank ARDA for bringing Donald Tapscott to the 2013 ARDA World event, where the vacation ownership industry learns, shares, networks and advances the future of timeshare ownership.