Industry Insights

V: How would you say vacation ownership is currently depicted by the media and perceived by the public?

GC: Owners and prospects appear to be bombarded with endless noise in the media about timeshare resales. We have to continue to educate the press and help them learn how to differentiate secondary-market problems from those in the timeshare industry. Media engagement is something we are currently working on, which should lessen the reported negatives about the industry and improve the overall perception of vacation ownership. Today developers are certainly more conscious of reputation management. Some have implemented public relations programs, which is improving awareness of their own brands.

PB: The largest misperceptions are about the flexibility of the product, the satisfaction rate that owners enjoy and the very nature of timeshare accommodations. These impressions persist because we haven’t yet solved how to unite and educate the masses in a memorable way. We’re beginning to take more control of our reputation as an industry, however. We’re starting conversations and creating product and industry advocates who get our message across in a post-advertising world. RCI has implemented a robust social-media strategy for listening to what the world has to say about our industry, as well as an accompanying engagement plan for educating owners and prospects. We’ve also made a tremendous investment in content, media and promotion to help spread the word about vacation ownership.

PR: We’re doing a good job of putting out tactical stories and responding to questions from the media. We really need to understand what those misperceptions are and what drives them, however, and conduct solid market research so we can focus in on owner and prospect behavior. Then we can develop a comprehensive strategy for shifting how people view timeshare and moving the industry forward. By that I don’t only mean getting rid of the negative. I also mean leveraging the positive. We have an 84 percent owner satisfaction rate; any industry would be proud of that number. If we do our job right, most of our time should be spent championing the positive.

V: What is your organization doing to promote the benefits of the timeshare product to prospects?

GC: At the NTOA we help owners sort fact from fiction. We’re on the front line, promoting the timeshare experience as a fun, affordable way to vacation and encouraging owners to use their leisure time to the fullest. Communicating with and educating owners is our top priority. We recently partnered with several companies and industry professionals to help us design an educational series that addresses every facet of the ownership cycle: purchase, exchange, rental and resale. We’re rolling this program out to our members via our web portal and through four live workshops held across the United States that can be replayed on our website. We also spend a lot of time working with media, elected officials and regulatory agencies to give them a better perspective on the various issues that affect timeshare owners. In the future we hope to share some of the consumer feedback we receive from our ASKNTOA owner assistance program [a resource through which owners can share their thoughts and request help].

PB: In the past year alone, RCI has conducted a major sweepstakes and aired advertisements on national cable television to educate consumers about timeshare. We also created a satellite media tour that coincided with the ARDA World convention in April 2014. It was picked up and covered by various media outlets across the country. In addition, RCI’s senior vice president of business development and operations, Fiona Downing, appeared on the Lifetime network’s weekday morning show The Balancing Act to discuss the benefits of timeshare. The episode aired four times throughout June and July to a national audience of 78 percent female viewers and 59 percent the next generation of owners, between the ages of 18 and 44.

PR: All our initiatives help build the reputation of the industry in some direct or indirect way. Recently, we relaunched ARDA’s consumer-facing website, VacationBetter.org. We envision it as an educational tool that anyone in the industry can send to new, current and prospective customers. We’ve intentionally kept sales out of the site; there’s no branding for our developers or partners. Twitter’s actually been our primary source of traffic, and social media has allowed us to reach out not only to the timeshare industry but also to the vacation and lifestyle communities. We’re joining bigger conversations with consumers who might otherwise never have considered a timeshare. Through a soft educational process, we find people who are close to our demographic profile and move them to consideration status. From there it’s up to the developers and people who are selling and servicing the product to make the conversion. Our job is to prepare them for the conversion.

V: How can others in the industry help change misperceptions and encourage engagement?

PB: Get involved! Many brands are focused on outbound publishing via social channels but are not as quick to listen, service and respond. RCI has a turnkey reputation management and online-listening service that enables companies to take control of their online reputations: the Timeshare Online Listening Center. Two things make TOLC unique. First, we use human analysts to verify proper sentiment and topic coding of online discussions. Natural-languages-processing algorithms found in online listening tools often miscode conversations. Second, our enterprise-level listening technology allows us to review tremendous amounts of social data, pull in and categorize daily conversations on social channels and deliver insights to our clients in an easy and digestible manner. We’re continually impressed with how our clients use TOLC. One used the service to orchestrate the launch of its branded social media presence. It was able to maintain its excellent online reputation while increasing the chatter surrounding the brand 50 percent every month! Today it remains one of the top-performing TOLC clients.

GC: Listen to your owners. They will tell you everything you want to know if they think you care about them. Owners have shared with us how important it is for them to be confident about their long-term ownership program as well as about the relationship they maintain with their developer, association or management company. The NTOA’s best practices suggest that owners remain informed and educated as resort programs and policies change over many years of ownership, and our proposed owner bill of rights is another strong body of language designed to build trust and show transparency.

PR: People engage, interact and purchase based on trust, so the industry as a whole needs to become more transparent. You always want to have a conversation with consumers rather than have them come to you with questions about something they learned without you. So become part of the conversation. We think VacationBetter.org in particular gives the industry insight into how to converse with people and why education is better than the hard sell.

V: How can the industry reach the next generation of timeshare owners?

GC: There are millions of owners who enjoy their timeshare experience right now, but behind them is a generation of potential owners who show an aversion to long-term commitments. It’s important to understand that millennials value choice at this stage in their lives. Early indications from our own Timeshare Ownership Study show that these new consumers would be attracted to diverse timeshare product offerings, such as a non-deeded product with a three-, five- or 10-year commitment tailored to different vacationing lifestyles. Millennials would also be open to a hybrid product under a good-better-best upgrade program that can be adjusted along with owners as they mature, have families and settle down.

PR: We’re actually well positioned with millennials. They get the concept. They would already rather buy 1 percent of a product and share it with other people if that’s all they’re going to use. So we just need to fine-tune the product to their comfort level. Really, millennials are only the tip of the iceberg; every generation now has to be marketed to with a very different collaborative, two-way sales process. Sometimes lifestyle is a better indicator. A millennial with a three-year-old is a lot like a baby boomer with a three-year-old but nothing at all like a single millennial without kids.

PB: Tomorrow’s owners are vastly different from our past prospects in how they think of vacation and value, the way they make decisions and what flexibility means to them. Affiliates need to reshape their product by de accentuating the commitment required to become a timeshare owner and promoting aspects that already mesh well with this generation, like the fact that vacation ownership is based on shared use and comes with tremendous flexibility. For instance, this past summer we had a lot of success with RCI’s Win Your Dream Vacation Sweepstakes, an interactive contest with a heavy viral component and a robust integrated-media strategy behind it. Registrants received bonus entries when they engaged in various activities related to learning about vacation ownership, such as answering trivia questions that dispelled timeshare myths. This high level of social engagement created a large amount of positive chatter for the industry. More than 7.5 million impressions came through the branded hashtag used during the promotion period on Twitter.

V: What improvements do you see in the future?

PR: At ARDA we’re working to provide an “air cover” of facts to drive engagement and move the industry forward. I see future initiatives having a major impact on interaction and building trust through reputation.

PB: Over the next two years we’ll see dramatic improvements in content creation and distribution, particularly in employing user-generated content. We’ll become better storytellers as an industry, and that will help us get our message across in a way that is understood better by the next generation of owners.

GC: There are larger and more diverse hospitality companies in timeshare today than there were just 10 years ago. These conglomerates have raised the bar by focusing on reputation management for some time now. We hope that the payoff or social currency for early adopters in the industry will make it compelling for others to follow.