TABLE OF CONTENTS After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
understand what the concept of resort timesharing means.
differentiate between the different timeshare products in terms of products and amenities offered.
apply resort life-cycle theory to the timeshare industry.
critically discuss factors that influence the growth of timesharing in an international market.
Timesharing, a term that combines the words time and share, is simply that the act of sharing vacation time at a luxurious resort facility in a geographical location of choice. As such, the timeshare sales representative promotes the timeshare product to interested consumers with the primary belief that the purchaser can achieve a higher level of intimacy by means of "sharing quality time" with people important in his or her life at a private resort that pampers consumers with recreational and leisure services that are unparalleled in quality.
The timeshare industry, otherwise known as vacation ownership, first appeared in Europe in the 1960s. One of the early entrants, a ski resort in France known as Superdevoluy, developed the first ownership program in the world. The purpose of the program was to give the owners of Superdevoluy a guaranteed opportunity to ski in the Alps (Baiman and Forbes, 1992). Not very long after the concept had taken hold in Europe the concept of sharing time at a resort was quickly adopted in the United States. The expansion was so pronounced that since the 1970s, the timeshare industry has recorded double-digit growth, which no other service sector...
