A New Era for Timeshare Sales

When the Wall Street Journal reports that the major hotel chains are pulling back significantly on their most profitable divisions in their companies, its a definite sign that the economy has changed and that discretionary income is much tighter.

As reported by Anton Troianovski and Kris Hudson, the big players in the hotel and resort industry – Wyndham, Marriott and Starwood are all scaling back their timeshare divisions.  Whereas these profit centers were major contributors to the bottom line in past years, they are increasingly becoming dead weights from the lack of buyers, the difficulty of selling timeshare loans and pricing pressure from the resale market.

Here are some eye-popping stats:

- Wyndham has 150 resorts world-wide and an estimated 830,000 timeshare owners!
- Wyndham will cut it’s timeshare business by 40% DOWN to an estimated $1.2 billion!
- In 2008, timeshares contributed 53% of the overall revenue to Wyndham and 42% earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA)!!
- Resale listings on a timeshare broker site increased by 30%, but sales have fallen by 50%!
- Delinquencies are now over 5% industry wide versus being slightly under 3% a year ago