I often hear from frustrated timeshare owners claiming they are unable to secure a reservation for either their home resort or an exchange resort but easily find a booking available on a rental site.
It’s true that there’s two separate pools of inventory at a resort; sold and unsold. In theory, sold inventory is made available to owners and exchangers according to the reservation rules pertaining to individual ownership. Unsold inventory, that is inventory that is owned by the resort, can be used for whatever the developer chooses. Oftentimes this inventory is advertised at a rate lower than the comparable maintenance fee in an attempt to bribe, er I mean entice consumers in for a sales pitch.
The key phrase in that last paragraph is “in theory”, as I defy anyone to be able to prove what happens to any one specific piece of inventory. Think about it...a single timeshare unit can have up to 50 individual owners (assuming the resort is doing the right thing and reserving 2 weeks for rehab and maintenance). Things get even murkier if the resort is point based, where ownership is more akin to a membership. How is any of this being tracked? Is it being tracked at all?
Or have millions of timeshare owners blindly put their trust and their money into a system that has absolutely no oversight and that can be manipulated as the developers see fit?
If you’re in the industry, I welcome your thoughts.
1 comment:
I agree entirely. Part of the problem has to do with homeowner associations that typically manage a particular resort. In theory, the association is a trustee, and the timeshare owners are beneficiaries. In theory, the association exists to advance the best interests of the owners. In theory.
In fact, the associations are the handmaidens of the developers, particularly the associations that manage resorts owned by major developers like Bluegreen and Diamond.
In theory, the solution is for owners to police their association, so as to make sure that the association avoids conflicts of interest with the developer. In reality, timeshare owners aren't lawyers with a sophisticated understanding of trustee-beneficiary law. In reality, timeshare owners have more interesting things to do with their lives than examining trust documents. Timeshare developers know that, and so they and the associations conspire to violate their fiduciary obligations to owners, and they do so with impunity.
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