On the Costa del Sol timeshare has always been, in one way or another, part of our daily lives. The Costa del Sol is actually one of the top five timeshare destinations in Europe. There are numerous timeshare resorts along the coast.
Thousands of tourists come every year on a timeshare holiday and thousands of our neighbours work at timeshare resorts or timeshare marketing companies. Therefore an article about the subject appears appropriate for this blog.
Just to avoid miss understandings:
I am pro-timeshare!
Timeshare provides a family the comfort of a home from home, without having to buy a property. In addition most timeshare resorts offer community facilities and services just like a hotel does. I had the pleasure to work at some of the most outstanding timeshare resorts in the past and did, and still do, believe in the product as such. There is nothing wrong with timeshare.
If you go regularly on vacation with your family and you can afford it, go for it. Its a product like any other leisure product and was originally created to satisfy the needs of a specific market: middle-class families.
You know which families I mean. Those conservative families living in these posh residential areas, two cars in the garage, him owning a medium size business, she a house wife and the kids going to private schools.
Yeah, those ones: The ones “Joe Bloke” , the average guy, envies, calls them snobs and refuses to accept them as normal part of our society. Joe Bloke sees them more as exception to the rule, or as some kind of aliens even, simply because he knows he will never be part of that class. He even refuses to call them mid-class, as that would imply, him being low class, and who wants to be called low-whatever?
What this has to do with timeshare? You will see later in this article , just keep reading.
What has given the timeshare industry a bad name, especially here in Spain, was the utter incompetence and total lack of professional ethics of the industry’s marketing bosses.
Instead of using a marketing approach, that it suitable to target the appropriate markets ( the middle class family), a whole industry went after Joe Bloke, the average guy. Why?
Very simple: Joe Bloke has dreams.
Joe is dreaming to give his family good times. He loves his family and he feels sad sometimes, when the kids are trying to persuade him to book Disney World instead of Fuengirola. He knows well his wifes impression on the face, when she sees TV adverts about the Seychelles.
But Joe got a normal job, a mortgage to pay, gets nasty letters from Visa and American Express refused him. Hence the reason we see him in Fuengirola and not on the Seychelles.
The approach to Joe Bloke is basically: buy a timeshare and you can fulfill your families dreams and go on vacation like the rich guys do ( that’s how Joe calls the middle class). Buy a timeshare and at least for those two weeks you are somebody special, somebody adored, spoiled, a good father drawing a smile on his children’s faces every time they remember their last vacation.
Easy victim, if it wasnt for the money.
Now, the unscrupulous bullshit pitch comes on the table. “They” (“they”, means the whole timeshare industry), gives Joe Bloke a “financial logic”, which on Wolfgang’s (me) bullshit scale reaches a solid 9 out of possible ten. “They” make Joe believe, that he actually saves money with timeshare.
They make him believe, that he can have the vacation he and his family always dreamed of, for the same amount of money he is spending on vacation anyway year after year.
Apart from the initial Investment.
At this point it gets almost criminal. They make him believe, that the purchase price is actually an investment and not an expenditure. In some cases they even promise an INCREASE of value and that he can RESALE it anytime, if he one day needs the money back. An outright lie.
Joe is sold, and can only say yes to the all important, a million times repeated question:
” If we can find a way to make this affordable to you, would you become a member today”?
Joe goes home, owning a timeshare, got a even higher mortgage then before and a commitment to pay maintenance fees every year. Not knowing yet, that timeshare has one thing in common with AIDS: once you have it…..
That’s how a good product was sold to the wrong market, over and over again.
The above was not the exeption, or the behaviour of some black sheeps of the industry. No, it was the marketing strategie of the whole European timeshare industry. Proper marketing and targeting the right market is actually the exception.
Today we face a multitude of timeshare resale scams. If you think about it: the timeshare industry which so firmly condemns such resale scams is actually responsible for their existence.
Wolfgang Brand
