Costa del Sol

Once upon a time there was the dream of having a hotel fully booked by selling clients a contract on a room for a week or two each year. With clients ”owning” their week the hotel could rely upon a certain amount of custom and the sale of a certain amount of food and merchandise.

The idea worked very well and the timeshare industry was born.

The idea is very simple. A hotel or resort is built and the rooms are sold for a term of 25 or 30 years. The capital cost of building the resort is soon recovered from the sales and running expenses are recovered from sales of food, merchandise and a small administration charge each year. The age of affordable luxury holidays had dawned.

Then it all went wrong.

Even though the rooms could be sold, there is a limited number of weeks in a year. Allowing for refurbishment, most rooms were sold for 50 weeks of the year. A resort with 100 rooms can sell 5,000 weeks of holiday. This guaranteed that the owner of each week could be sure to have that week available when he wanted it. Nobody else could use it without his permission. The problems started to arise when there were more than 5,000 people wanting to own a week at the resort. A way had to be found to enable the resort to sell what it did not have.

The “floating” week was the solution.

The floating week was promoted as a huge improvement on the old system because the weeks of holiday could be taken within a band of weeks. A summer week or a winter week could be bought. The floating week became very popular with the resorts and were promoted heavily. Many owners were convinced to give up their fixed week and pay more money to convert to a floating week in order to be able to vary their holiday dates. For the resorts this was a brilliant move. They could now sell a room for as many weeks as they liked.

Why?

Because nobody had the absolute right to use any week! People were talked into giving up their ”right” to a week in the resort for the ”possibility” of having a week in the resort. If the room was not available that was just too bad. Floating weeks were such a huge success for the resorts that they thought of an even more clever way to sell resorts many times over.

POINTS!

No longer was there any pretence that the client owned time at a paticular resort. Oh, no. He owned time at ALL the reorts in the system – subject to availability. Genuine fixed week timeshare is the only timeshare product that guarantees you a week of holiday in the resort of your choice (ie – the one you bpught at). If you have a fixed week, hang on to it.

As the resorts became greedier, administration charges for timeshares took off. It has been a long time since a timeshare resort in Spain represented the core of a cheap holiday. The initial cost is horrendously high for a product that guarantees you nothing. The administration charges on some resorts is more than the cost of a package holiday that could be just as enjoyable. Certainly they could pay the costs of a decent hotel room with careful shopping around. It is the administration charges that persuade so many people to try to sell their timeshares and leave them susceptible to the siren songs of the resale sharks.

Timeshare resorts are a great product. They supply the quality of accommodation and the service that clients  expect. Nobody in a timeshare resort should have anything to complain about. The organisation that sells the time at the resorts is another matter altogether. Their reputations are not enhanced by five and six hour presentations ending in a hard close. Nor do the blatant lies told to inveigle prospects to part with their money earn them any respect. It is such a great pity that the selling of the product has become more important than the product.

With points the product has become as elastic as water and the demand by sales managers of their salesmen to sell more water become more strident as more people realise that the product they bought is not the product they were told they had bought. Who has time to read the small print after five or six hours of pressure? ‘