vacation ownership

Through a multi-year contract extension, Interval International, a worldwide leader in timeshare exchange and vacation services, has expanded and extended its relationship with King’s Creek Plantation LLC. The agreement covers all three phases of King’s Creek Plantation in Williamsburg, Virginia, and any resort properties developed during the duration of the agreement.

Interval International timeshare exchange will also be assisting in the design and launch of the new King’s Creek points-based vacation club, to be known as Club Explore.

David Gilbert, executive vice president of resort sales and marketing for Interval International, says, “We are very pleased to take our relationship with the King’s Creek team to the next level and collaborate with them as they enhance their already successful business. Long known for delivering unique vacation experiences, King’s Creek now also offers its owners the ultimate in flexibility with the addition of its points-based club.”

King’s Creek Plantation is an 98-acre timeshare resort that includes The Cottages, The Townes, and The Estates. Designed to emulate the desirable features of a great residential community, King’s Creek Plantation includes cottage timeshare units, condos and estate homes, all with charming front porches and roomy decks. On-property amenities include a fitness center, tennis and basketball courts, a jogging trail, indoor and outdoor hot tubs, a pool and a conveniently located general store. A tram keeps it easy for timeshare owners and guests to move around the timeshare resort.

Check The Timeshare Authority blog this week for more about this popular Williamsburg timeshare resort and the benefits of Club Explore. And follow these links for great deals on King’s Creek Plantation timeshare resales and timeshare rentals:

King’s Creek Plantation cottages and townhomes

King’s Creek Plantation Estates

In yesterday’s The Timeshare Authority blog I shared how impressed I was that a Forbes Magazine interview between magazine publisher, Rich Karlgaard and IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, that reads as if it is written as a business plan for the timeshare industry.

If you haven’t read yesterday’s post, you’ll want to because I looked at three points that IBM has seen as critical to helping it reach its 100-year /$100 billion milestone. Now let me share a couple other takeaways I had from the interview, which to me, is a road map that the timeshare industry should be following

Timeshares and Learning from Mistakes

In the early 1990s IBM almost went bankrupt. Yet here they are today, twenty years later, going strong. How did this happen?

IBM invented a PC, but according to Palmisano, the company viewed it as, “a gadget”. Because the company did not see the PC as a platform, it “missed the shift”. And as Palmisano goes on to explain, “So the lesson to me is you cannot miss the shifts. You have to move to the future.”

The way people buy, sell, and use timeshare has clearly shifted. No one wants to be “sold to” anymore. Consumers want to read reviews, comparison shop, and negotiate a deal that includes the features that are best for them and the way they like to vacation. Buying online, whether it is timeshare, timeshare resales, or timeshare rentals, is a way of shopping that most people are very comfortable doing. People already book hotels and air travel online; it is a logical step to them to also engage in timeshare transactions the same way.

What consumers are not comfortable with is a vacation ownership product that lacks options and lacks flexibility, both in the way they buy and sell it and the ways they can use it.

More Wisdom for Vacation Ownership

When asked how IBM was dealing with the current economic climate, Palmisano said, “To me it’s no different than post World War II. Then the world was restoring itself economically after the great wars. Now the world is rebalancing itself after a big financial crisis. Then, as now, IBM is aggressively moving into new countries, new markets.”

But in the same interview, Palmisano also reminded us, “But you can’t push everywhere. You have to focus.”

This isn’t contradictory advice; this is rock solid business planning. Timeshares, which didn’t get their start until the early 1970s, didn’t weather the great Depression or need to bounce back after two world wars, as IBM has done. When the economy faltered in the last few years, the timeshare industry had no previous learning experience from which to draw. We could not look at our business history and ask, “What did we do to drop back and punt the last time this happened?”

With no history to draw from, some timeshare companies did not recognize what steps to take next. At Sell My Timeshare NOW, the changing economy caused us to do our own rebalancing. We changed where and how we spend money; we tightened our belt; and most importantly, we looked for ways to serve our market better.

We elected to place more emphasis on giving timeshare owners a choice between a timeshare broker assisted sale and a sale by owner. We’ve ramped up our skills to make sure we offer top notch service for both types of timeshare sales. Among other things, we are doing, we’ve rebuilt much of our website to make it easier and more efficient for buyers and renters to find the properties that fit their budgets and their vacation needs.

In short, we have both rebalanced and sharpened our focus and as a result, despite the economy, Sell My Timeshare NOW is a stronger company than ever before. With only an eight-year history of business, Sell My Timeshare NOW is certainly no IBM. But we can proudly say that we share a few values and strategies with the business behemoth; we focus on our clients, we work smart; and we try very hard to be relevant to today’s consumer’s demands.

And who knows where the next 92 years will take us …

Last month, IBM celebrated 100 years in business. Coincidently, their 100-year anniversary is also the year the company will exceed $100 billion in sales.

I am a great believer that there is much to learn from both the success and the failure of others, but perhaps what surprised me most was how much there is specifically for the timeshare industry to learn from the success (of which there has been much) and the failure (of which there has been some) of IBM.

In an interview with Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes Magazine, IBM’s Sam Palmisano shared some insights IBM has discovered during its 100 years of business. They probably apply to all businesses, but they clearly are insights for all of us in the timeshare industry. Here’s some of what Palmisano shared:

• From its inception, IBM believed that if you really create value, you will be around a long time. Value for your consumer is more enduring than just getting bigger as a company.
• “The Watsons (Thomas J. Watson, who took over IBM as a three-year-old company and his son Thomas Jr., who together led the company for over 6 decades) believed that every decade or so you had to reinvent the company and drive to the future.”
• When asked, “How do most companies blow it?” Palmisano replied, “They make it complicated with 15 different variables or 20 different algorithms in 170 countries. That is way too hard to do. You’ll never, in my opinion, get it done that way. If you make it complicated it’s too difficult for everyone to understand it and see their role in it. That’s when you see this thing begin to fall apart.”

The Message for Timeshare Developers, Timeshare Sales, and Timeshare Resales

Timeshare can learn from IBM.

Whether you are selling technology or timeshares, it is remarkable how much the message is the same: Provide value; change with the needs of your market; and keep your plan and your services simple.

In tomorrow’s post on The Timeshare Authority, I will be sharing a few other insights from IBM, some I considered to be particularly profound for timeshare, fractional, and vacation ownership companies.

Guest post by Brooke Doucha, who manages corporate communications and media relations for Orange Lake Resorts, home to Holiday Inn Club Vacations.

The “Social Media Brass Tactics” session at ARDA’s Northeast Conference in Providence, RI last week was fun, energetic and full of ideas. Though I’d planned to share our Q&A in this post, instead I’m going to share an important concept that came out of that session. In one word, collaboration.

As I mentioned in my previous post here on The Timeshare Authority, our social media session on June 7 offered three breakout workshop from which participants could choose. One focused on customer service and listening / reaching out to owners through social media channels. Another was about using monitoring tools to manage social media monitoring and report back with metrics. Last, my session focused on how to use social media as a PR pitching tool and the idea of creating a “Guest Blogger” program.

As panel presenters, we utilized the space of the room to do something different: converse openly with groups about tactics that have worked for us, and may also work for others in the industry. Each session, whether focused on customer service or marketing and communications, emphasized the importance of the central concept of collaboration when it comes to social media.

When adopting a social media program for your company, it’s important to remember that it’s not just one person’s responsibility, but rather a company-wide decision to welcome communication through new channels and to treat it with just as much respect and dedication as all other channels (phone, e-mail, print and electronic communications).

Here’s how collaboration works, as it applies to the three topics we discussed:

When it comes to customer service, social media can provide opportunities for real-time resolution. Follow me here: Your brand has a Twitter or Facebook account. You receive an inquiry about points usage via tweet or post. Luckily, the “collaborative model” you’ve adopted as an organization has one person in customer service or communications monitoring the mentions of your handle(s) on these two social channels. That person decides to either directly respond to the inquiry, or, because it’s more involved, the workflow dictates they assign the response to the club communications team member who will follow-up with more detail. Voila! Real-time customer service.

Social media “brass tactics” panelist Sara Bader Little, Director of Corporate Communications for Festiva Hospitality Group, advises: “Spend time on social media, but don’t let it overtake any one person’s time. Be sure it can be closely and constantly monitored for immediately responding to customers. It should enhance your existing customer service, not replace it.”

The monitoring of your social mentions may be a task that one person initially handles, but as you grow to expand your brand’s presence to more social media channels, let that number of “official monitors” grow, too. There are great social media monitoring dashboards out there, like Radian6 and Hootsuite that make it easy to assign specific mentions and inquiries to other team members. As panelist Philip Brojan of RCI discussed, it’s important to monitor your mentions daily so that you can be responsive—and it’s equally important to establish workflows that spread that responsibility among team members who can be various subject matter experts on behalf of the organization.

When it comes to public relations outreach via social media channels, it’s about getting teams involved in the execution of special moments and events that create great stories. For a Guest Blogger program, for example, you may want to establish a lead who will create new connections with bloggers, work with the operations to set them up with special activities or experiences available on-site, then have your social media champions create excitement around the blogger’s visit to the property, pre-, during- and post-stay. You can always get more traction when you have more hands on deck.

Say it with me: collaboration. If you find yourself having to do more with less and the idea of adding a social media program is overwhelming, look around you. You have talented experts that can contribute great content and ideas, and social media is the perfect place for that.

If you couldn’t make the ARDA Northeast Conference but want to participate in the post-event discussion in 140 characters or less, tweet your questions to @ARDAOrg and use the hashtag #SMbrasstactics.