Timeshare Owners

The play’s the thing for Pocono Mountain timeshare owners

The Shawnee Playhouse Theater has been an entertainment staple for vacationers in the Pocono Mountains since 1979. This summer, for the first time since the theater’s 1979 opening season, the playhouse will offer four different shows each week – a theatergoers delight.

Why the change from four plays that run consecutively to four different plays per week?

According to Jerry Durkin, chairman of the informal playhouse board and a cast member in “Same Time, Next Year,” the idea came after seeing the results of an online survey taken by 650 Poconos timeshare owners. The favorite amenity of the vacation property owners is not golf, skiing, or even just enjoying the mountains themselves – it is the Shawnee Playhouse.

This summer, the charming 210-seat theater that claims to have no bad seats in the house, will present: “A Chorus Line,” “Grease,” “Godspell,” “Same Time, Next Year,” and “The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare Abridged.”

Orlando’s bed tax is not an issue for timeshare owners or those who rent timeshare by-owner.

How did you feel when you helped pay for the expansion of the Convention Center in Orlando? And wasn’t that nice of you to underwrite the city bus system there and pay for all those television ads to attract more tourists to Central Florida?

Don’t remember doing that?

If you enjoyed an Orlando vacation and stayed in a hotel or motel room there, then you did donate to a number of city and county projects—in addition to the donation you made via state and county sales tax to the highways, school systems and community services enjoyed by Florida residents.

The Central Florida vacation area, like many other tourist destinations across the country, levies a tourist tax or bed tax on top of their state and local sales tax. Hotel and motel occupants must pay both taxes on every room night booked. And because this double taxation accounts for a minimum of 11 percent of every hotel bill, (more in some areas) it is no wonder travelers reel with sticker shock when they see their final bill.

But residents of The City Beautiful may soon have to find another way to build a new arena for the NBA’s Orlando Magic and a new community performing arts center. Despite the fact that tourism is up in central Florida—hotel occupancy is down. When industry experts went looking for someone to blame for the room night shortage, (because surely the tourists were not all sleeping in their cars) they found the culprit to be timeshare resorts!

According to Staff Writer, Tim Barker, of the Orlando Sentinel in 2001, 10 percent of all visitors to the area stayed in Orlando timeshares. By 2005, that number had increased to 15 percent. Because timeshare owners are actual property owners, they do pay a percentage of their unit’s annual property or real estate taxes. But they are not charged with bed tax or sales tax on timeshare nights because they are sleeping in a bed they actually own.

What’s more, most timeshare renters are not charged the bed tax, if they lease a timeshare property directly from the person who owns it. Until municipal governments figure out how to collect and enforce such an effort, they simply have no way to track or collect the bed tax on individual transactions that often take place online, outside the state of Florida, perhaps even outside the US. The only situation in which timeshare renters are likely to be hit by the bed tax is when they rent timeshare directly from the resort.

So if you are considering selling your Orlando timeshare, the good news is that the Orlando resale market gets stronger and stronger all the time. And if you’d like to hang on to your timeshare resort property and use it as a rental, that market looks equally solid, especially as hotel rates (and their additional taxes) creep upward, already up 9 percent in the first quarter of 2006 compared with 2005.

No wonder even highly

Though details remain sketchy, timeshare owners band together for a legal fight.

The publicity surrounding the Crowne Plaza Golf Resort and Casino at Royal Oasis, located on Grand Bahama, highlights a worst-case scenario for any timeshare owner. The resort was damaged by a hurricane in September of 2004 and rendered unuseable. Since then, no improvements or repairs have been made. Timeshare owners have been issued no information about the fate of the resort, especially the timeshare arm of the operation.

I have spoken with a number of concerned owners, most of whom are asking “could this happen to me?” For this reason, I’d like to point out that scandals of this nature are hardly commonplace in the industry, epecially these days. Though rotten apples exist in any basket, there’s plenty of good apples too. This is especially true of timeshares in the Bahamas, among which can be found some of the most opulent resort properties in the world.

With big resort companies investing more and more money into timeshares every year, smaller companies cannot afford to conduct themselves dishonestly. They simply can’t compete with the big boys unless they offer owners and guests the same guarantees and level of service as their more established competitors. In business, ailing organizations which can’t compete are weeded out in favor of those which can. Maybe this is what we’re seeing here, in the case of this resort. The real tragedy here is that timeshare owners are caught in the middle.

We reported on this story back in January. Since then, important developments have come to light:

• Timeshare owners have banded together to file a class-action lawsuit in order to recover money lost through this fiasco.
• Several high-profile resort development companies have expressed interest in purchasing this property. Among these are Planet Hollywood and Westgate Resorts.

Remodeling/repairing a facility of this size is an extremely costly undertaking. It may be more economically viable for the new owners to sell new timeshares. If this is the case, what about those who already own timeshare at this facility?

Hopefully this lawsuit can bring closure for the timeshare owners concerned. The small number of “worst practices” operators in this industry make it hard for all other legitimate vacation/travel companies to do business, simply by association.

It’s time for the “bad apples” to demonstrate some basic accountability. Enough is enough!

See Also

• The Freeport News
  “No Word Yet on Royal Oasis Sale”

ResortLynx is a new “infotainment” product being introduced to many timeshare and hotel properties. Numbered among new features: pay-per-view and high-speed internet.

Insystcom ResortLynx is an “infotainment” product which more and more timeshare owners will be encountering in the future. ResortLynx offers guests at many Carribean and US timeshares a variety of audiovisual amenities, including interactive pay-per-view entertainment, high-speed and WiFi internet access, and on-demand content featuring multicast channels.

Sure beats hacking into the resort office’s wireless network (for the record, I intend this remark as a humorous jibe and not a suggestion, as the Timeshare Owners’ Blog would never condone any behavior which may waste bandwidth or violate local regulations). We’ve all heard stories about this quest for connectivity, wherein hotel guests find themselves clutching a laptop, pressed up against the window in a fruitless attempt to connect to a wireless router hundereds of feet below. A comprehensive, in-room wireless/high speed internet service could help to drastically minimize this problem.

In my experience, resort and hotel wireless connectivity can be ranked on a scale. At one end we have a certain San Jose boutique hotel, which offers guests free internet access of breathtaking speed. At the other end, we have one of Bucharest’s most prestigious hotels, which has been known to charge guests daily rent on a mysterious plastic box which doesn’t work. Hotels at this end of the connectivity spectrum might learn a thing or two from