Timeshare Weeks

As the festivities of Super Bowl XLIII kick into high gear, football fans and partygoers by the thousands are descending on Tampa, St. Petersburg, all the surrounding “burgs” and even Orlando, which is some 70 miles away.

Tampa hotel rooms are sold out, although there are still some rooms available across the bay bridge on the beaches of St. Petersburg. If you can find a room in the Tampa area, expect to pay from $500 to $900 a night; if you opt for Orlando, the prices are about half that much this weekend. Of course, if you owned Florida timeshare, and had scheduled to use days during this week, you’d already have accommodations in the right place for taking in the hottest ticket in town.

A timeshare along Florida’s Gulf Coast would be especially convenient, but Tampa’s middle of the state location means that anywhere you own Florida timeshare, you would only be an easy half-day’s drive away from seeing the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Arizona Cardinals.

Here’s what you could be enjoying:

Music: Celine Dion; The Eagles; Rihana; Fall Out Boy; Lifehouse; the Latin-flavored Pepsi Musica concert; the annual Super Bowl Gospel Celebration; jazz greats playing at the SuperLX Live! daytime concert ; and at halftime–Faith Hill; John Legend; and of course, The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.

Other Entertainment: Comedian Dane Cook; a youth football game featuring the L.A. All-Stars coached by rapper Snoop Dogg and a Tampa area team coached by former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Mike Alstott; and of course parties; parties and more parties. Some of the biggest names hosting (or attending) pre and post Super Bowl parties this year include Nelly; T-Pain; Flo Rida; Sean “Diddy” Combs; Paris Hilton; Kim Kardashian; Leigh Steinberg; Donald Trump; and Paris Hilton.

Area Attractions: Busch Gardens; historic Ybor City; the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino; and miles and miles of great beaches, including Fort DeSoto Park and Caladesi Island.

Use Your Timeshare Interval and Don’t Miss the Next Big Event

Okay, enough couch time; there’s a future sporting event calling you. Get a calendar. Go to Google. Look up all those championships you wish you could see live, but never do. Find future dates and locations, and then plan to use your timeshare days accordingly. You bought that timeshare to really enjoy … and seeing the Super Bowl, the NCAA basketball championship, NASCAR races, or any other monumental championship in sports is a perfect way to get the most out of timeshare ownership.

I don’t know how many cities Santa Claus covered on Christmas Eve and in the wee hours of Christmas Day, but he’s about the only one who can take in more territory than you can as a timeshare owner with great timeshare exchange privileges.

Timeshare exchange is designed to give you flexibility in vacation destinations, dates, and accommodations. Resort Condominiums International (RCI) and Interval International, (II) are the two largest timeshare exchange companies, but there are dozens of other companies, many of which specialize in regional or other targeted types of travel. You will find the cost to join a timeshare company varies, as will the types of services they offer.

In their book, How to Benefit from Your Timeshare, authors Susan Johnson and Janice Taylor describe the benefits of timeshare exchange like this:

“An Exchange Club is an organization that lists thousands of travel destinations for use by its members. … An Exchange Club take points/weeks that you do not want to use in the current year and allows you to use and select from their huge inventory of locations worldwide. You should receive a directory from the Exchange Club listing all properties available to you within their network.”

Currently there are 4,775 RCI affiliated timeshare resorts and 2,400 resorts affiliated with Interval International.

Follow this link to learn more about the opportunities of timeshare exchange. And to help you get started in planning your vacations, here is a handy timeshare calendar or, you may wish to visit the website for Timeshare Calendar.

Group RCI recently released research showing that 876,000 timeshare weeks (that’s new timeshare sales only) were sold worldwide in 2007, according to an article in the July edition of Perspective magazine. The information is published in Group RCI’s Latin America and the Caribbean Vacation Ownership Fact Book 2007, and reveals a 6 percent increase in the sale of new timeshare (timeshare bought from the developer) over timeshare sales in 2006. Of this increase, timeshare sales in Latin America account for 30 percent of the total amount, or 261,000 timeshare weeks sold.

More Information about South America Timeshare Sales

Here are some other noteworthy facts about timeshare sales from the RCI Fact Book:

• 57 new timeshare resorts became affiliated with an exchange system in Latin America in 2007.
• Of the 1,154 timeshare resorts in Latin America affiliated with a timeshare exchange company, more than 750 of them are located in the Caribbean, Central America, or Mexico.
• Other high-growth areas for South America timeshare include Brazil timeshare, Venezuela timeshare, and Argentina timeshare.

Stats that appear in the book are based on research derived from the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and regional Tourism Ministries and their affiliates. Ricardo Montaudon, President and Managing Director, Group RCI, The Americas, describes the book as a, “…valuable publication that offers potential investors and entrepreneurs interested in the vacation ownership industry an objective overview of the current state of the industry and of its performance last year.”

According to an article that appeared this week in Boston.com, Steve Shermoen plans to spend his retirement years traveling the world and staying in timeshare resorts. Shermoen, an attorney from International Falls, MN, says he owns about 100 timeshare weeks, bought with an eye on his retirement.

Tom Kelly, author of the article, explains, “A growing number of entrepreneurs with an exceptional grasp of timeshare purchasing, closing and selling have begun to acquire inexpensive weeks at upscale resorts via resale channels, which they then rent out weekly or on a per-night rate comparable to what a nice hotel would charge.”

Using some of his timeshares weeks as timeshare rentals is part of Shermoen’s plan. But he clearly understands the importance of buying timeshare resales rather than buying timeshare from the developer. Shermoen says, “You cannot make the rental concept work if you buy directly from the developer. You have to be sure of what you are buying and purchase only on the resale market. The cost from the developer simply is too high for it to become a rental that will pencil out.”

Here is the advice Shermoen offered for picking up great deals on timeshare resales:

• Look for timeshare owners who may be desperate to sell because of unexpected circumstances, such as job loss, divorce, or a death in the family.
• Stick to big name brands, such Marriott timeshare, Hyatt timeshare, and Hilton timeshare.
• Look for timeshare resales during the time of year when annual fees are announced for the next year.
• And for Shermoen, who happens to be an attorney, he offers to provide timeshare closing at a discounted fee.

Okay, but suppose you are not an attorney, you are not in the market for 100 timeshare weeks, and you want a good deal, but you are not willing to read the obituaries looking for desperate timeshare sellers?

The article, which is titled, “Despite Economy, Timeshares Drum Up Big Business,” suggests looking for points based timeshare ownership.

The Good Things about Timeshare Points

Points based timeshare, as the Boston.com article correctly points out, offers flexibility. While some interval based timeshare ownership allows you to break up your time into segments of less than one week, almost all points based timeshare lets you choose whether you use it one night at a time, or in blocks of consecutive days.

Once timeshare becomes lodging you can schedule as you would a hotel stay, it suddenly becomes something you use not just for vacations, but for family reunions, long weekends, weddings, and as a day by day rental.

On the other hand, the article also brings to light a downside about timeshare points. Points are like dollars, they represent a spending value that can be used for timeshare and other vacation related expenses, like air travel and cruises. But like the dollar, the value of your points can go down, depending upon how many timeshare points overall a resort issues.

If you are planning, like the attorney mentioned in this article, to use some of your timeshare weeks in future years (possibly renting the timeshare weeks you are not using), you need to understand how the fluctuation of timeshare points could affect you. The number of points it takes to “buy” a timeshare week today, may not be sufficient to “buy” a full week by the time you retire.

No choice is perfect. There are positives and negatives about buying a vacation home, buying timeshare, renting timeshare, or staying at home and never taking a vacation. But as Steve Shermoen figured out, buying timeshare the right way, at the right price, can turn out to be a very good plan. Just do your homework first!