The current worldwide pandemic has upended nearly all industries and hospitality has been hit especially hard. By some accounts, upwards of 70% of the timeshare workforce has been laid off or furloughed. It will be months, perhaps years, before the industry gets up and running again and many timeshare resorts will not survive.
All is not lost however. I believe that this is a crucial time for timeshare developers. Those that are both nimble and not stuck in the past will thrive. Here are 3 ways the timeshare industry could be better after the pandemic:
- OPCing will become obsolete. It will be impossible to maintain proper social distancing while hawking free dinner show or discounted theme park tickets to a wary public. Developers will learn, as every other industry has already learned, that target marketing using traditional advertising channels is the best way to attract consumers.
- Packed sales centers will become obsolete. The days of consumers sitting across tiny round tables from the salesperson in a room full of hundreds of other tiny round tables will be over. This is good news, as timeshare never really was a one size fits all sales proposition. Asking consumers to spend $20,000 or more on a product that has a perpetual contract requires more finesse and more individual attention than those sales rooms ever provided.
- False promises of “today only pricing” will become obsolete. No one actually believes in this myth anyway, so it’s long past time for it to be retired. Because the sales process will no longer be held in large, over-crowded sales centers as discussed above, developers will be forced to provide more time for consumers to understand the product and reach a purchasing decision without forcing a false sense of urgency.
In addition to these 3 significant changes, nimble developers will begin to change the way they communicate with owners and prospective owners alike. Owners in particular, will not easily forget how developers and exchange companies communicated and treated them during this crisis and will reward those good guys with their continued loyalty. The bad guys...they’re not going to be able to withstand the one two punch of a prolonged financial crisis coupled with owners abandoning them.
