timeshare news

It is not too late to make your last timeshare vacation pay off in a big way. ARDA’s website, www.vacationbetter.org is dedicated to providing information on timeshare, fractionals and private residence clubs with the goal of showing vacationers meaningful ways to vacation better. Again this year, they are hosting the Bring Your Vacation to Life contest, and your old vacation photos and favorite stories could make you a winner.

All you have to do to turn your vacation memories into a $1000 gift certificate is to submit the best vacation short story, photo, or vacation video in the contest. Select a photo, tell a story, or share a video that captures how a timeshare vacation helped changed your life, your health, or your happiness.

You can upload your stories, photos, or videos online at the VacationBetter website. You can submit them via email to:
[email protected]

By mail to:

Each entry must include:

Are you someone with lots of great timeshare vacation memories? That’s okay; you can enter as often as you like.

Here are the rules, exactly as stated by the American Resort Development Association:

“You must own all rights to any photograph, story or video entered in this contest. It is the responsibility of the contestant to ensure that publication and use of photographs, stories or video by ARDA raises no legal claims. Submitted photographs, stories and video are the exclusive property of ARDA. ARDA maintains the right to reproduce and use the submitted photographs, stories and video (with credits) for any legitimate purpose, including but not limited to usage in publications, web pages, presentations and other materials.”

Winners will be notified on Friday, September 25, 2009, by email and the winning story, photos, and video will be featured in ARDA’s Developments Magazine and on ARDA.org and www.vacationbetter.org.

Winners in each of the three categories will receive a $1000 AMEX gift card.

Visit www.vacationbetter.org for full details and watch the following video from ARDA with Jim Lewis, president of Disney Vacation Club and chairman of the American Resort Development Association.

Barbara De Lollis covers business travel for USA TODAY. In a recent series of interviews with Wyndham CEO Steve Holmes she asked some specific questions and received some very encouraging answers.

Although one cannot get around the fact that Wyndham timeshare has laid off approximately 4,000 employees in the past year—-most of whom were employed in timeshare sales—-Steve Holmes says Wyndham timeshare is pleased with its business for 2009.

Wyndham Timeshare Sales Have New Goals

Now the logical question is how can 4,000 layoffs and a 39 percent drop in timeshare sales during the second quarter of 2009 (compared to the same quarter last year), make any timeshare sales company pleased?

The answer comes in the changing outlook at Wyndham timeshare. With credit lines drying up, Wyndham timeshare (as with most timeshare developers) could not finance timeshare sales for as many new buyers as they have in the past. They had little choice but to sell fewer timeshare units, yet try to make their sales efforts more efficient.

Instead of operating on a ‘bigger is better’ approach, Wyndham seems to have taken a ‘better is better’ approach. With a scaled-back business plan for 2009, Wyndham timeshare has approached timeshare sales with reduced goals. Without the need for so many prospective buyers, the company needs fewer timeshare sales people to set up timeshare presentations and tours.

Wyndham timeshare sales for 2009 are focusing on efficiency. The company is trying to drive up the percentage of people who buy timeshare after they take a Wyndham timeshare sales tour, as well as increase the amount of those sales. According to Holmes, “In our business, both (measures) were up in the first half of the year. We continue to be very pleased.”

Here’s an interesting interview with Steve Holmes at the PhoCusWright 2008 Conference where he speaks in detail about Wyndham’s strategies for dealing with the current economy.

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.

Imagine a floating city, rising 1200 feet in the air, designed to generate its own electricity, withstand hurricane winds, and eliminate the need for automobiles within its structure. This is the vision for the New Orleans Arcology Habitat, (NOAH) and if you think it looks like something out of The Matrix, you are right.

Now imagine owning timeshare there.

The project has been proposed for placement in the Mississippi River gulf, adjacent to the commercial district of downtown New Orleans. With an estimated 30 million square feet at build out, the NOAH project would include 20,000 rental condos, three hotels, and 1500 timeshare units, with the timeshare averaging 1100 square feet each.

The proposal also includes 3 casinos; 500,000 square feet of commercial space; parking for 8,000 cars; cultural facilities; public works; schools; admin offices; and a hospital.

I can’t say if or when this will come to fruition, but when you consider the visionary construction that has been undertaken in Dubai at “The Palm” and the Dubai Tower, (which both offer Dubai timeshare) we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss this as “overly futuristic”. New Orleans timeshares have always been a popular vacation destination and one can only imagine the interest that timeshares within this environmentally green, hurricane resistant, innovative property could create.

Tangram 3DS LLC, (a firm specializing in visualization and computer animation) is responsible for creating the computer-generated images and partnering with the designer Kevin Schopfer to visualize his concepts throughout the design process. Here’s a video look at a rendering of the exterior of this amazing structure, courtesy of Tangram 3DS LLC: