vacation ownership

Occidental Vacation Club, a division of Occidental Hotels and Resorts (Madrid), announced that its vacation club membership is up year over year for 2011, at its all-inclusive resorts.

The President of Occidental Vacation Club, Luis Namnum, says, “We are attributing this steady climb to our all-inclusive model, which is becoming more and more popular with travelers. In addition, we continue to receive very high marks on traveler based web sites such as Travelocity. People who own and visit here continue to give us extremely high satisfaction ratings not only for our paradise-like vacation destinations, but also for the warmth and hospitality they find when they arrive.”

Occidental Vacation Club has beautiful resorts in Mexico and the Caribbean, with eleven all-inclusive Occidental Vacation Club resorts in Aruba, Costa Rica, The Dominican Republic, and Mexico. The club’s membership includes over 23,000 members and saw an approximate seven percent increase in sales in 2011, increasing from $31.81 million in 2010 to $35.45 million in 2011. Roughly 1500 new families became Occidental Vacation Club members in 2011.

“We were proud to be listed near the top of the leaderboard among timeshare resorts in active sales according to a survey conducted by Vacation Ownership WORLD Magazine.”

What Does All Inclusive Mean in Vacation Club Ownership?

While many people are familiar with all inclusive resorts, they do not realize that some vacation clubs and timeshares offer all inclusive pricing.

At Occidental, membership means that guests enjoy unlimited meals and snacks during each day of their vacation, along with á la carte dining in specialty restaurants including unlimited alcoholic beverages.

Club member/owners pay no fee for tennis on lighted courts, water polo, aqua aerobics, and kayaking where available. They enjoy unlimited use of the fitness center and other onsite amenities as well as daily and nightly shows, live entertainment, and use of a supervised Kids Club for children, ages 4 through 12. All taxes and gratuities are included.

Many in the vacation ownership and timeshare industry know that our company has been making major changes in order to serve both our consumer clients and our industry clients better. On March 30 of this year, we announced our newest brand: VacationOwnership.com. (see: Leading Timeshare Resale Company Rebranding As VacationOwnership.Com)

Rebranding a company, especially one with an internet presence as expansive as ours, is a big challenge. Although our new website www.vacationownership.com is busy with the online activity of timeshare buyers, sellers, and renters through our licensed timeshare brokerage, we are still working daily to expand and improve the website.

We have also had the exciting opportunity of working on our new corporate logo. A process that isn’t—and really shouldn’t be—easy to do. After all, a logo plays an important role for a company. It must communicate, brand, engage, and attract. At the same time, it needs to look good on your website, your golf shirt, or your business card. It can’t be too busy or it will be distracting, nor can it be too plain which would make it boring. Most importantly, it has to speak to others for your company when you are not there to speak yourself.

The number of people who can say they would recognize the CEOs of NIKE, Coco-Cola, or McDonalds if they saw him or her walking by is vastly smaller than the number of people who know the brand marks of those corporations. People recognize certain logos so well that they can instantly identify them even without the presence of the company’s name beside the mark.

Yes, a little logo carries a lot of responsibility on its back. We can’t wait to start unveiling ours. We tried to think of a good hint to share about our new logo but decided that for now, we’d just have to tell you that it makes us feel good about our company every time we see it and we hope that’s how it will make you feel, too.

…watch for it soon!

Bluegreen Travel Services, the internal travel agency of Bluegreen Vacations timeshare, has been awarded the Vacation.com President’s Award as part of the organization’s 6th Annual “Power of Partnership” (POP) Awards.

Bluegreen Travel Services was one of six award winners out of the Vacation.com network of more than five thousand travel service agencies. The award was presented to Bluegreen during the 14th International Conference and Trade Show, which was held onboard the Royal Caribbean International Oasis of the Seas®.

Bluegreen Travel Services Director of Travel Services, Tracy Burnett, says, “We are pleased to be honored as one of Vacation.com’s top agencies. To be singled out for this award is very gratifying. The resources we have available to us as part of Vacation.com allow us to excel at providing our clients with superior products, services and, ultimately, memorable vacation experiences.”

Bluegreen Resorts manages, markets, and sells the Bluegreen Vacation Club, points based deeded timeshare and vacation ownership. Currently there are more than 160,000 Bluegreen timeshare owners worldwide.

About  Vacation.com

Recognized as the largest travel services marketing organization in North America’s, Vacation.com serves independent retail travel agencies across the United States and Canada. The cruise took more than 1200 travel professionals attending the convention event through the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten, while including 5 general sessions that included two industry executive panels and the Preferred Supplier and Destination Trade Show and over 100 training sessions.

AdGooroo has released interesting information from an internet search analysis showing that the most frequently occurring travel-related internet searches  involve transportation … airlines, train schedules, and automobile rentals.

But after travelers and vacationers figure out how they are getting where they seek to go, what topics are they then researching the most?

Analyzing roughly 1,000 travel-related keywords searched on Google an estimated 2.4 billion times during January and February 2012, AdGooroo found that 7.3 percent of all searches involved the word “Disney” while another 6.3 percent involved the words, “Las Vegas.”

Other frequently searched terms include the words: Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico and Hawaii.

Richard Stokes, founder and CEO of AdGooroo, says, “Travel is one of the most keyword-competitive industries. So it represents fertile ground for search marketers in the travel category to apply industry insight and deepen their understanding both of their marketplace and the competitive landscape.”

The Timeshare Industry Already Understood Where You Wanted to Vacation

For the timeshare industry, these search patterns only  reveal what timeshare developers already understand. The greatest concentration of timeshare resorts in any one area is found in Disney World’s hometown, Orlando, Florida. And not far behind in popularity for are Las Vegas timeshares, Caribbean timeshares, the many beautiful Mexico timeshare resorts, and of course, Hawaii timeshares, which is where timesharing in the US first got started.

Although the AdGooroo study only reinforces what the timeshare resort and vacation ownership industry already recognized about where people like to vacation and holiday, it did show that travel-related online searches are still reflecting a tight economy.  Words such as coupon, cheap, deal, low-price, and discount, show up in 13.3 percent of travel-related online searches. And with the excellent discounts available in timeshare resales and timeshare rentals, bargain hunting travelers should be able to find exactly what they are seeking for their next vacation, at the destination they most want to visit and at a price that fits even a tight vacation budget.