Greater cooperation between Europe's timeshare and fractional industries is needed to face shared problems of finance and marketing, according to delegates at the Perspective shared ownership Forum.
The conference, held in London on 9-10 December and organised by media company Perspective International, was designed to encourage debate between representatives from the two industries.
“It was clear that many of the fractional companies wanted to 100% disassociate themselves from the timeshare industry,” Perspective CEO, Paul Mattimoe, told OPP after the event.
“[But] it was noted by many that they were still part of the same “industry” and so fractional developers should follow the lessons learned by the timeshare industry over the last 40 years as if something goes wrong with one product it will reflect badly on the other as well.
“In North America there’s already more of a realisation that the two go together, and in the end it’s the consumer’s perception that determines this, not the marketing department of a resort development.”
Client is king
The success of timeshare developers upgrading to fractional higlighted the importance of industry cooperation, said Robin Mills, chairman of the Resort Development Organisation (RDO) communications council, and a panel moderator at the Forum.
“More and more timeshare developers are doing fractional and there is a realisation that mixed use is the way forward,” he told OPP. “Companies such as Pestana Hotels in Portugal are taking people up from timeshare to fractional to freehold and down the other way.”
“One of the most important things discussed was the need to remember that the client is king – it’s very expensive to get clients and easy to lose them. The timeshare industry has been bad at keeping its client base. New clients were so easy to come by before and so they’ve never taken the care to look after their existing ones.
Finance emerged as one of the biggest issues facing both industries. “The British are the biggest timeshare buyers in Europe and they make 65-50% of purchases with finance and the same goes for fractional developers,” said Mills.
“Because sales without bank lending will come down to the availability of developer finance, the smaller independent companies will suffer.”
Timeshare dominant?
However, some delegates from the fractional industry felt that timeshare still dominated proceedings. “The die-hard traditional timeshare developers were still dismissive of fractional – not totally in all cases but they do see it as competition. About half still saw it as a fad outside of the high-end market,” said Nick Turner, VP and head of new business development at The Registry Collection.