The Resort Trades

From the pages of the December issue of The Resort Trades, we are reprinting this article by Jason Tremblay of Sell My Timeshare NOW and VacationOwnership.com. In the article, “You Have 8 Seconds Left,” we look at the challenges anyone (and everyone) in sales and marketing faces in this fast-changing world where distraction dominates and over-stimulation is the norm.

For timeshare sellers and timeshare resellers, the challenge will be not only how to differentiate oneself from one’s competitors, but how to hold the fleeting attention of prospective timeshare buyers and renters, once their attention is gained.

You Have 8 Seconds Left

by Jason Tremblay, founder of Sell My Timeshare NOW and Vacation Ownership.com

In the year 2000, according to Psychology Today and other credible sources, the average person’s attention span for any one thought was a mere 12 seconds. Yet as pathetic as that sounds, the even more frightening news is that this number has dropped by 40 percent, leaving us with eight seconds in which to engage, attract, express, build, sell, grow, bond, and communicate.

Or have I already lost your attention?

To put it another way, according to research by whoever is in the business of measuring the brain functions of goldfish, a goldfish with its nine-second attention span now has a human outpaced when it comes to the ability to focus. For business, this means you have eight seconds to get the attention of consumers, and if you succeed, you have another eight seconds in which to present your message. Then, if you are still managing to capture their interest, you have eight additional seconds in which to close your sale, make your point, or cement your relationship. And these numbers also apply to the attention spans of your sales team, marketing staff, IT department, HR team, and everyone else in your company you are counting on to make your business run.

You can debate whether our dwindling capability to concentrate should be blamed on our diet, our life style, chemicals in our environment or any number of other possibilities, but there is one culprit that no one disputes. Computer use is making us both smarter and dumber simultaneously; both faster at what we do and increasingly inefficient in our ability to do it.

In the U.S., the average adult spends a combined 8.5 hours per day in front of a monitor of some type, either a computer, smart phone, or television. Although a large portion of this time is work related, the rest is by choice. Among teens, with the use of computers for study, and of televisions, video games, and smart phones for everything else, the amount of time spent on line has gone from 3.43 hours a day in 2000, to seven hours per day, seven days a week.

Since 2000, overall Internet use in the United States has risen by 127 percent. During this same period, the diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) has increased by 66 percent. Maybe doctors and clinicians are better at diagnosing the condition than they were 12 years ago, or perhaps overall awareness of ADHD is better and because of it, more people are being tested for the dysfunction. But the potential link between our increasingly computer-centric lives and our decreasing capability to focus is both obvious and hard to ignore.

In a future world, that has already begun, where people spend increasing percentages of their days distracted by bits and bytes of information that incessantly demand one’s attention, the need for a respite from this will be (and already is) crucial. Getaways, vacations, long weekends, and relief from our daily routines will be of greater importance in our lives than ever before, perhaps not only mentally necessary, but medically necessary, as well. It’s logical to anticipate that the demand will be for easy access, easy implementation vacation options. The timeshare and vacation ownership industry will need to make the shared ownership product fully flexible in order to accommodate work schedules that are anything but flexible.

While some vacationers will seek true escapes, most will gravitate toward resorts that offer serene space and relaxing experiences, yet still afford guests maximum connectivity options to reconnect with all of their devices and platforms on an “as needed” basis. How much does connectivity matter during a vacation? Travelers and vacationers rank the need for free Wi-Fi only 3 percentage points lower than they rank the importance of a comfortable bed.

This strange, distracted, always-connected world is our reality. Although it is hard to imagine, attention spans will likely become shorter. As business professionals, we will be called to get our message out to our market in ways that are sharper and more exciting. We will need to capture and hold the consumer’s interest in smaller and smaller snippets of time. More importantly, not only are the fish for which we all compete growing less interested, but also the ocean in which they swim is getting bigger and bigger. In the year 2000, there were eight million live websites and 15.6 million registered domain names. By 2011, those numbers had increased to 366.8 million live websites and a whopping 555 million registered domains.

As daunting as this task sounds, we actually may have found ourselves in the right business at the right time. Timeshares, if we can deliver them through the channels our market wants to receive them, could become a critical part of the necessary decompression process from daily life for a whole new market of owners and renters. In timeshare and vacation ownership, it’s easy to get caught up, thinking that we sell points, units, weeks, or intervals. We don’t. We are in the business of selling life-changing moments, a product sure to be in hot demand …as long as we manage to communicate our message in eight seconds or less.

 Sell My Timeshare NOW appreciates The Resort Trades for permission to reprint this article. 

The following article was published in the June issue of The Resort Trades, and is reprinted here with its permission.

For Timeshares and US Economy: Tourism is Not a Luxury Anymore

by Jason Tremblay

After too many years of hearing that the world is on ‘staycation,’ cutting back on travel and bypassing the family vacation, this spring’s U.N. World Trade Organization announcement on tourism brought the welcome news that more than one billion people will cross international borders as tourists in 2012.

Think about it, a billion tourists, staying overnight, spending money, and forming opinions about where and how they will vacation and spend their tourism dollars in the future. No day travelers are included in this count, only those visitors who spend at least one night on foreign soil are counted. Likewise, no cruise ship passengers are included. The one billion traveler projection is a hard number of real tourists and is expected to be reached by early this fall.

As Taleb Rifai, Secretary General of the UNWTO explains, “Tourism is not a luxury anymore.” More and more people are building international travel into even the tightest budgets. The idea of global tourism as a life essential rather than a luxury expenditure is a true indicator of significant cultural shifts in the way people think about travel. With television and the internet making foreign cultures familiar to us, ‘foreign’ no longer feels so foreign; our curiosity is sparked to learn more, and international travel has become as much about personal growth as it has about vacation holidays.

Imagine this; one out of every seven men, women or children on the planet will travel to another country this year. So, where are we all going?

France, the United States and China top the list of most popular destinations for international visitors, with the greatest percentage of all travelers, some 55 percent, coming from Europe. In the same way that more and more tourists see international travel as a necessity of life, business people, political leaders, and global economists are coming to understand that international tourism is also an indisputable necessity for economies at all levels. Tourism is no longer a luxury in the family budget nor has it ever been a revenue source that global economies have the ‘luxury’ of overlooking.

The Power of Tourism in Dollars and Cents

In 2012, travel and tourism contributed two trillion dollars to the Gross National Product in the U.S., which is larger than the contribution of the chemical industry and has more than twice the economic impact of automotive manufacturing. Factoring in direct, indirect and induced impact on the Gross Domestic Product, travel and tourism contributed more than six trillion dollars to the global GDP and sustained 255 million jobs, that is, one in every twelve jobs worldwide.

Tourism has tremendous potential to restore global and local economies. At the same time, it promotes cultural heritage and understanding and generates jobs for workers at all levels of skill and education. But if international tourism is the driving force it appears to be, are we in the timeshare and vacation ownership industries doing all we can to nurture and support its growth? What is your business leaving on the table that could be different if you made a few simple changes to better serve your international client?

Start with your website—your storefront to the worldwide marketplace—and consider the following questions:

• Does your content use English succinctly? The jargon that sounds conversational to the majority of your website visitors may be confusing to those for whom English is a second language or who do not speak Americanized English.
• If you offer webpage content language conversion, make sure that someone who is proficient in that language reviews the results your conversion program yields as such programs do not always produce reliable, coherent text.
• Do you make time zone and money conversions easy for your clients?
• Does your website include quotes or endorsements about your company from international contributors?
• Do the online forms on your website function even if your international visitor can’t fill in all of the required blanks created for your U.S. website visitor?
• Are your sales and marketing campaigns sensitive to major religious or national holidays from countries other than the U.S.?

Look at your customer service …

• Do you offer customer service that is convenient for consumers in all time zones or do your foreign clients have to get out of bed to interact with you?
• Toll free phone numbers seem like a way to accommodate your clients, but many toll free numbers do not work for international callers. Offer alternative phone numbers that can be reached when calling from abroad.
• Do you have personnel available to respond to your marketplace in languages other than English? You can’t cover all languages but even small companies can strive to have a few employees who speak French, Spanish or other widely spoken language.

Pay attention to your global presence …

• Does someone in your company make comments on blogs and other online media from publications outside the U.S., when the topic is appropriate?
• Are you building working relationships with industry peers in other countries, taking advantage of globally focused industry events, such as ARDA World?
• And perhaps the most challenging question for all of us, are you proactively advocating for legislation and guidelines that encourage and support international tourism?

Under fire recently by tourism officials worldwide is the decision by India’s Airport Economic Regulatory Authority to increase airport charges by 346 percent; the European Union’s imposition of a Carbon Emission Tax; and the United States’ tough visa rules for tourists that many claim has cost the U.S. $600 billion and half a million jobs in lost international tourism over the last decade.

Through the efforts of a public-private partnership, the U.S. is taking steps to change the slow and often convoluted process of visa approval for tourists from certain countries—a process that came about primarily in response to post 9-11 concerns regarding homeland security, and has commenced a marketing campaign directed at international tourists. It’s a first-ever advertising campaign to market the United States as a tourist destination and was launched this spring in Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan with plans to expand to Brazil and South Korea in upcoming weeks. Under the name, “Brand USA,” the efforts of this consortium have drawn support from some in the timeshare industry, but have not become a campaign that vacation ownership has united behind in all the ways it could.

The U.S.A. is a destination that a new, emerging middle class from countries around the globe is anxious to visit. Once they arrive, they will all need accommodations. The timeshare industry doesn’t have the luxury of overlooking this market.

The following article appears in the October issue of The Resort Trades. Looking at the changes, growth, and new directions of Google, you have to wonder if vacation ownership and timeshare companies are getting the message.

Google and Frommer’s Travel Guides: Will vacation ownership get the message?

by Jason Tremblay

It’s been almost a year since Google purchased Zagat Restaurant guides and six years since it bought YouTube. Now Google is buying Frommer’s travel guidebooks from publisher John Wiley & Sons, in a transaction that may already be completed by the time this article goes to press. And although Frommer’s travel guidebooks brush too lightly over timeshare as a vacation accommodations option, that’s only part of the discussion about Google and the vacation ownership industry.

Google, from search to content 

Google is positioned as the highest deity in Internet search, masterminding the algorithms that determine what you, me and every other Web user sees when searching the Internet via the Google platform. Whether Google defines updates to its search algorithm as a panda, a penguin or any other anthropomorphic identity, the truth is, we are talking about one powerful mega-beast that calls the shots here in the jungle.

If you could ask Google what business it is in, you would likely get an answer that makes the company sound like a giant compass always pointing to true magnetic north. Theoretically, this is accurate. Google is a search engine that points to what are intended to be results that are the most relevant to the word or words you are searching.

Since the scope of the Internet is massive, the results returned are typically massive too, requiring that Google maintain a system for ranking by quality and relevancy to your search terms, the order of the results it returns to you.

This daunting task leads Google to continual adjustments and overhauls of the processes behind its complex algorithms for search-and-organize. But with such a system in place, even Google itself has to live by its own rules when it comes to the structuring of how search results are returned. And although a litany of factors feed into this structuring, right now, Google, the King of the Jungle, says the most important factor is content. He or she who produces the best, richest, freshest and most relevant content on a regular basis can rule his or her little niche of the wilderness.

More than 15 years ago, Bill Gates pointed to content as the key collateral on the Internet, saying, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” While we have all heard it repeatedly said that content is king (and perhaps said it ourselves), that message is taking on greater importance than ever.

Although sales calls, print advertising, timeshare resort tours, and other ways to market and message vacation ownership are important for the sale of new timeshares, developers know that Internet visibility also matters – and matters more and more each day.

For timeshare resales, Internet visibility is very nearly the whole ball of wax. So when Google, a search engine, purchases Frommer’s travel guides, one of the largest providers of travel and tourism content in the world, every company in the business of timeshare and timeshare resales should take it very seriously.

For more than half a century, Frommer’s has published definitive travel guides that in recent years have included both print and online products helping travelers make their vacation decisions, while offering a rich resource of tips, insights, family travel suggestions, and accommodations reviews. Exactly how Google plans to use this wealth of information has not been, nor is it likely to be, fully disclosed. But here is some of what we do know. In July of 2010, Google acquired ITA Software, a Cambridge, Mass., flight information software company, enabling Google to use flight search technology for Google local search.

As Google builds local search and travel search engines, the content from Frommer’s could easily be imported into the search process, showing up in search, local search and mobile apps. And Google has publicly said, “The Frommer’s team and the quality and scope of their content will be a great addition to the Zagat team. We can’t wait to start working with them on our goal to provide a review for every relevant place in the world.”

Google’s statement begs one really important question: “Is your timeshare resort a ‘relevant place’ in the world as defined by Google?” Don’t worry, if you don’t have enough rich, quality content to communicate to the World Wide Web that you are a relevant place; Google will gladly sell you an ad to help you fight poor placement in search results. eMarketer, a leading digital data analysis company, projects that travel advertisers will spend $3.16 billion for online advertising this year, an increase of 23 percent over spending in 2011.

Don’t blame Google

Before you decide that Google has crossed a line it shouldn’t, you might consider whether the company has actually been nudged over the line. Google is a search company that competes against Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, and Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Google’s launch of Chrome, its own browser, helps keep it competitive in a world where Microsoft products and defaults are standard in most PCs sold today.

When Google created Google , in the name of improved search, most savvy Internet users recognized that although it likely improves Internet search, Google , with its friend circles and content sharing, is as much about being a social platform as it is about search. But, if the content on Facebook – the world’s largest social platform – was more searchable by Google, would Google have ever ventured into social media?

Whether it’s Google Play, Google , Chrome, YouTube or any of dozens of other ways Google is expanding its services, Google has been more than just a search engine for a long time. Google is a company, expanding its roles and redefining its brand and its services in an ever-evolving marketplace, and nobody calls that sinister. We call that good business.

Unquestionably there is a lot of gray area about directions Google is taking and we all have to hope that regulators get it right. But the fact remains that these directions are already in play and are already influencing your business on a daily basis takes us back to the two most important questions raised here: Did we get the message and do we know what to do to make timeshares “relevant places in the world” by making vacation ownership germane to broader vacation and accommodations searches in the eyes of Google?

The answer comes down to a single thought: Content really is king.

(This article is reprinted with permission of The Resort Trades. You can read it there online, along with all the news and updates of timeshare and vacation ownership.

The following article by Jason Tremblay was first published in the August issue of The Resort Trades and is republished here with their permission.

Since 1986, The Resort Trades has been a respected source of news and information targeting the resort and timeshare sales industry. The Resort Trades offers display advertising, classified advertising, Trade Member listings, as well as monthly industry news and press releases, global analysis articles, and in-depth interviews with industry professionals and business leaders.

At SellMyTimeshareNow.com and VacationOwnership.com we are honored to among their contributing authors.

Timeshare: A maze or amazing?

By Jason Tremblay

Everything about the opportunity to own your vacation, to return to favorite destinations or explore new venues, and to do so in comfort, security and style is amazing… except when we in the timeshare and vacation ownership industry manage to turn amaze into “a maze.” In print, the distinction between the two words is one tiny empty space. If we examine our businesses, we might find that the differentiation in the way we view our purpose and our product is equally as subtle. Yet, unchecked, what we do in the timeshare industry that turns amaze into a maze can become the critical difference between a sale and no sale and even the difference between business success and business failure.

Ironically, in vacation ownership, we seem to teeter on the edge of turning our amazing product into a maze of rules, guidelines, caveats, and restrictions. Governed by legislation and impacted by everyone from OSHA, to the real estate industry, the Federal Trade Commission, and endless other agencies and watchdogs, vacation ownership is already complicated. If we stepped back and thought about it, we might start turning our energy as an industry toward streamlining and simplifying our products and services as much as possible.

Why? Because simpler is always better and because most timeshare owners do not understand what they own. Even though they may be satisfied with their ownership, they often don’t take advantage of the full benefits and features to which they are entitled because they aren’t aware of them or don’t understand that these benefits apply to them. And the biggest reason to simplify what we sell is because consumers have stopped listening. Traditional marketing no longer works in the way it once did and for the snippet of mental bandwidth a consumer allocates to “listening,” he or she is not going to burn it on marketing and advertising messages that are complicated. The simple story will win out every time.

Why consumers have stopped listening

A number of years ago, author Seth Godin spoke at one of the TED conferences (www.ted.com) about why interruption marketing no longer works. For years, interruption marketing has been the basis of television advertising that interrupts the programming consumers sit down to watch. Interruption marketing pops into our lives in the form of Internet advertising, email campaigns, those annoying popup ads and stacks of junk mail we are all forced to deal with because the postal service delivers it to our front door. In timeshares, interruption marketing has taken its own unique forms. There is mail and email, but there are also phone calls from timeshare sales associates, OPCs and on-site sales staff who interrupt people during their vacations.

We all understand how annoying interruption marketing can be because even though we are business people with products to market, we are also consumers ourselves. We know what we hate and we know why others hate it too, and we shouldn’t assume that we’ve written our marketing collateral in a way that somehow makes it less annoying than that of anyone else engaged in interruption marketing.

For years, the premise behind interruption marketing worked. Consumers made buying decisions based on the impact of ads, commercials, and overtures from direct sales personnel – until it all became like living near the railroad tracks.

The trains still roll through every day and every night, but we no longer hear them. Over the years, they’ve become larger, faster, and louder… but it doesn’t matter. Even when they shake our houses, we simply do not notice. As consumers who have been bombarded by marketing and advertising since we were in utero, and we have become highly effective at tuning it out.

We record our television shows so we can fast forward through the commercials. We put pop-up blockers on our computers, scroll past the Internet advertising we want to ignore, delete emails without opening them, and let phone calls we don’t want to answer go to our voice mail. As desensitized consumers, we respond only to that which amazes us and we run backward from anything that is not painlessly simple to understand and use. Who has time for mazes?

Simplicity in purpose

Timeshare developers, hospitality brands and resorts have a beautifully simple purpose in their message. Timeshares are prepaid ownership of the way vacations make you feel. Everybody is happier on vacation. Vacation ownership is a prepaid commitment to having intervals of vacation happiness in your life. All the rest of the bells, whistles, perks, and benefits are important… but not really. The simple message of vacation ownership always comes down to the fact that you, me and every other consumer is always happier on vacation.

In timeshare resales, it is equally easy to lose sight of the simple purpose. Consumers buy vacation ownership resales because of the price. If timeshares were not lower in price from the reseller than from the resort, no consumer would ever buy on the resale market. Timeshare buyers would, 100 percent of the time, buy timeshare from the developer, because buying from the source intrinsically carries with it confidence-inspiring factors. Resellers have one feature to sell that differentiates them from developer sales and one feature only: price.

Simplicity in product

The guidelines for owning, using, exchanging and enjoying your timeshare product are simple to you because you helped draft them, you approved them and of course, you understand them. But most timeshare owners look at the guidelines that come with their timeshare and think they are as simple as federal tax code. There are clubs, tiers, perks, membership levels, colors, stars and reward programs. Potential owners get a whiff of the complexities of timeshare ownership guidelines and they can’t back away fast enough.

Today’s timeshare buyer isn’t like Ward and June Cleaver who bought timeshare decades ago. June was a domestic engineer, devoted to all the details of the family’s life. If she and Ward wanted to commit their spare time to working their way through the stipulations involved in using their timeshare, they had more flexibility to do so than do most of today’s timeshare buyers.

Everyone is always happier on vacation

Recently Godin wrote a blog post titled, “It’s Easier to Love a Brand When the Brand Loves You Back.” Questioning why gift certificates have an expiration date, he described it as, “a policy designed to punish a few outlier customers while it actually annoys all of them.”

Let’s simplify. Kill the maze. Be amazing. Love your customers so they have a reason to love you back. And remember that everyone is always happier on vacation.

You can also read this article in the September 2012 issue of The Resort Trades magazine.