timeshare news

With Thanksgiving festivities coming up shortly, this is the perfect time to introduce a new contributor to the Timeshare Owners’ Blog. Please welcome our good friend, Ms. Lucia Kaplan.

With this year’s holiday season looming nigh, I’ll take this opportunity to wish our readers a happy and safe Thanksgiving. In keeping with my festive mood, I’d like to introduce you to a good friend of ours, Ms. Lucia Kaplan. Ms. Kaplan is a writer and editor with a strong background in business, especially when it concerns the all-important business of how we spend our free time and hard-earney money. 

You can expect to read more from Ms. Kaplan in the coming months. I hope you enjoy her unique insights in today’s article, which deals with an unusual holiday dish…

It May Be Is Time to Think About Turducken

by Lucia Kaplan 

We are well into the month of November. Are the preparations for your turducken on schedule?

That’s right, your turducken.

Hate to admit you doesn’t know the ins and outs of turduckens? Perhaps you are new to the subject and only gained your first knowledge of them when the current issue of National Geographic featured turducken on their cover, alongside Indonesia, ocelots, and revolutionary events in Nepal.

Turduckens (as everyone should know by now) are the culinary delight that results when a whole, boneless chicken is filled with andouille sausage, shrimp, oyster, or traditional cornbread stuffing, and liberally massaged with Cajun seasoning. Then, the stuffed chicken is itself stuffed inside a similarly prepared whole, boneless duck, which in turn, is stuffed into a whole, boneless turkey. Tur-duck-en!

If you have missed the pleasures of a juicy, slow roasted turducken, then you have missed A LOT. Turducken lovers travel to Louisiana, particularly around the holiday season, just to enjoy this regional delicacy. Type “turducken” into your search engine and you will find half a dozen turducken specialists (almost exclusively in the Bayou State) that will overnight ship you a frozen turducken, many offering you choices of seasonings and stuffing.  Or if your skills are up to the boning, stuffing, and fowl supervision, you can easily find delicious recipes, including some from legendary Louisiana chef Paul Prudhomme, for preparing a bird inside a bird inside another bird.

So what’s the real connection between turducken and timeshares? If you are planning a Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other winter season holiday, and haven’t decided where to go, consider Louisiana and Mississippi timeshares.

Yes, this summer’s hurricane season was devastating. But the businesses that are open (or reopened) need your patronage. Spend your tourist dollars in an area that has experienced a dramatic decline in business, and you are helping people get back to the business of living. And when you are spending those dollars in Louisiana and Mississippi, you are right in the heart of turducken country—reason in itself to plan a timeshare holiday. 

If you can’t fit a Louisiana timeshare vacation into your schedule right now, consider ordering a turducken this year. Many companies that sell this triple-play holiday feast are donating a portion of their receipts to the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The two hottest trends in timeshares today, condo-hotels and private residence clubs will occupy a prominent place in the timeshare landscape for years to come.

It seems like everyone’s been talking about condo-hotels and private residence clubs, but these concepts are new enough that few timeshare owners know what they are. What differentiates these concepts from traditional timeshares?

An article on hospitalitynet.org points to a .pdf file by Timo B. Jones, CEO of a company called TimeShareWare. TimeShareWare provides software products for resort companies, and their website can be found at http://www.timeshareware.com. In this article, Mr. Jones sheds light on the distinguishing characteristics of both condo-hotels and private residence clubs, and suggested that existing customer relationship management technologies might not be flexible enough to accommodate all the nuances of these new types of timeshares.

Anyone who has ever tried to check into his/her hotel and heard “…we rented out your room and we have nothing else available” would find this article of interest. If a resort’s CRM software is outdated, customer service snafus could easily ensue.

Though mention of timeshare was conspicuously absent from this year’s Throne Speech, Bermuda’s higher-ups say that reform of timeshare legislation is in the post.

Reform of the laws governing timeshare in Bermuda is viewed by many as glaringly overdue. The last piece of legislation to address timeshare ownership was passed in 1981, which means that those owners who haven’t renewed their leases are approaching the end of their tenure. Under current laws, timeshares are good for 25 years, though the option to renew is available.

Though timeshare wasn’t one of the items under discussion in this year’s Throne Speech, legislation is now being prepared to allow owners to own Bermuda timeshares for longer periods. This article from the Royal Gazette describes some proposed Bermuda timeshare reforms.

Bermuda is looking for ways to augment tourism revenues. Hopefully they consider passing this legislation, which would bring Bermuda timeshare into the 21st century. Here’s another article about the many opportunities and challenges that Bermuda timeshare and resort developers are facing.

A new Chairman is scheduled to assume command of the Federal Reserve. How will this affect the timeshare market?

Do you remember who was Chairman of the Federal Reserve before Alan Greenspan spent eighteen years in the job?

Neither does anyone else.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul A. Volcker, has not slipped from our memories because he failed to leave his mark on the American economy. Volcker in fact, is credited with taking runaway US inflation from an ugly 9% in 1980 to a highly tolerable 3.2% by 1983.

It’s just that Alan Greenspan has been the chief watchdog of the American economy for such a long time—two and a half Bushes, one Reagan, and a Clinton, to be exact. We apparently assumed that despite the absence of a clutch bag and a tiara, Greenspan, was like one of the British royals, and would hold the job forever.

Not true. On January 31, 2006, Alan Greenspan will pass the torch to Chairman-nominee, Ben Bernanke. Like Greenspan, Volcker, and all who have gone before him, Bernanke will face the challenges of balancing healthy growth with an appropriately healthy measure of inflation.

The strategy is pretty simple: when prices go too high, the Fed pushes up interest rates. We stop buying things on borrowed money, and prices come back down. Of course, it’s not really simple at all. Especially since the US Federal Reserve doesn’t actually control any part of our economy except interest rates. The ups and downs in our financial system are a mixture of backlash response to changing interest rates and pure chance.

Paul Volcker accomplished no monetary miracle other than the predictable result that occurred when the Reserve temporarily kicked interest rates into double-digit numbers in order to bring inflationary growth under control once again. Alan Greenspan has been using this same technique in moderation throughout his time at the helm, and using it aggressively since June 2004, when the Federal Reserve started tightening the screws on borrowing and lending.

In the summer of 2004, the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks loan money to each other) was at an amazing low 1%. The prime lending rate (the interest rate at which banks loan money to consumers) was sitting at only 4%. So Greenspan and his merry men began nudging up the interest rates, in tiny, palatable quarter points. And Bernanke will have no choice, but to follow the plan—at least for a little while. After all, he can’t start out appearing to be soft on inflation.

If you are buying real estate—whether it is a new house, office building, vacation home, or timeshare property—and you are planning to borrow money for your purchase, it is probably better to take out that loan now than to wait until the first or second quarters of 2006. On the flip side, if you are the seller, this may be a good time to get your property on the market, while buyers can take advantage of current interest rates.

No real magic ever happens at the Federal Reserve. No one gets sawn in half or even pulls a scraggly rabbit out of a top hat. But when it comes to juggling acts, Bernanke has his work cut out for him filling the shoes of Greenspan and Volcker.