In early February 2001 I attended my first timeshare sales pitch. Our family wanted a vacation so we took an opportunity to take a three day vacation at the Massanutten all seasons resort in Virginia as part of a timeshare promotion. (See our Massanutten Resort report for a diary and photos of our vacation.). As this was my only timeshare experience, I won't use it to generalize the way timeshares are sold; however, there were aspects of the experience that I believe apply to most if not all timeshares and I'll point those out.

1) What is a timeshare?

A timeshare is a sliver of time a person buys of a vacation property, generally one or two fixed weeks out of the year, that entitles the person to use that property during their ownership period. The property is deeded for that time period so the ownership is legal and complete. For example, you can buy the first week of February (now until forever) of a three room condo in the mountains. The place where the condo exists would generally be a resort and during your week you would have access to all its amenities. If you bought a timeshare on a beach, the week in February would be less desirable (and less expensive) then one in the summer. For a fee, you may also trade your week at your property to someone who has the same or a different week at a different property. (For example, your winter week in the mountains can be traded for a summer week at the beach, hence you don't have to do the same type of vacation every year.) You may also rent your week at your property to another and "cash-in" that year.

2) Rationale Given for Buying a Timeshare

The primary logical argument we were given for buying a timeshare is formalized below:

P1: Family vacations are very important to take for personal and family health.
P2: Having a timeshare is a way to guarantee a family vacation.
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C: Therefore, buying a timeshare is a way to improve personal and family health.

The conclusion follows from the premises and I believe this to be the rationale behind all timeshare sales pitches. Our salesperson made some additional claims to strengthen the argument for buying a timeshare:

• Families don't spend enough time together as a family.
• People don't take enough vacations.
• If you list the benefits and drawbacks for the various accommodations one can use on a vacation (hotel/motel, rental house, friends' place, campsite, apartment), an exercise we did, a timeshare has all the benefits of each of them and none of their drawbacks.

• Buying a timeshare is something millions of people are happy to have done
• Owning a timeshare makes you special (e.g., "all the cool stuff you see here is yours--for a week out of the year--and how many people do you know that have this much?")
• The gift of a timeshare to one's descendants is a legacy you will leave.

• A Massanutten timeshare is a highly regarded one so it's easier to trade out
• The resort's facilities (pools, ski slopes, golf, hiking trails, horseback riding, canoeing, gyms, ponds stocked for fishing, etc.) are wonderful
• Most of its accommodations sleep six which makes trading out easier
• The three rooms can each be sealed off which enables couples with kids to be sexually intimate (when that might be difficult when staying in a hotel)
• Massanutten has Gold memberships (at an additional cost) that enable those members to use the 7,000 acre facilities anytime, not just during their scheduled vacation week.

3) Why the Rationale to Buy Isn't Compelling

Some of the claims listed above are false and most of the others are largely irrelevant. I present my thoughts on each claim in blue below.

P1: Family vacations are very important to take for personal and family health.
Agreed. We have and use five weeks of vacation a year; only a few days of which are spent in our house.

P2: Having a timeshare is a way to guarantee a family vacation.
False. A timeshare can be cashed in for the year. The determining factor in whether or not one takes a vacation in a year is desire, not pre-owned property. Time and expense are also important factors in determining the length and nature of vacations taken in a year.

• Families don't spend enough time together as a family.
  Agreed but it generally doesn't apply to us due to our family orientation, homeschooling, and numerous weeks of time off from work. Having a week or two of vacation together doesn't add a lot of family time. (Our salesperson told us how he had his teenage stepson as a captive audience while he was baiting his fishing hook. "He has to listen, I'm holding the bait." Sad. He owns two timeshares and credits them with saving his second marriage.)



• People don't take enough vacations.
  Probably true, though not as applicable to our family.



• If you list the benefits and drawbacks for the various accommodations one can use on a vacation (hotel/motel, rental house, friends' place, campsite, apartment), a timeshare has all the benefits of each of them and none of their drawbacks.
  False. One benefit in staying with friends is being with them in their surroundings. A benefit of camping is the intimacy with nature it can provide. (When we visited Yosemite, we wanted to be camping.) A timeshare doesn't have these benefits. Also, staying in nearly any of these other places is less expensive than staying in one's own timeshare. (The cost is described in greater detail below.) When vacationing, except when we are wanting to stay with friends or camp, our accommodations are largely irrelevant. We intend to minimize time spent in them. The purpose of vacation accommodations is to provide us a place to store belongings, sleep, shave, shower, and use the bathroom. Those requirements can be met inexpensively (which frees up money to do more things while on vacation or to take more and longer vacations).



• Buying a timeshare is something millions of people are happy to have done
  If so, good for them. That doesn't make it right for anyone else. I also know of many people who are unhappy they have bought a timeshare. Many people are trying to sell their timeshares on the Internet. Missy owned a timeshare at the beach in the past. It was sold at a loss without her ever having used it.



• Owning a timeshare makes you special (e.g., "all the cool stuff you see here is yours--for a week out of the year--and how many people do you know that have this much?")
  It would make me feel suckered (for spending so much) and trapped (for lost vacation flexibility). More on these below. I don't buy things to impress people, I buy for function and value.



• The gift of a timeshare to one's descendants is a legacy you will leave.
  True, but is it a good or even worthwhile legacy? Willed property is not so easily transferred or divided up as more liquid assets. Money not spent on a timeshare, invested nearly anywhere else, would be worth more than the timeshare (it is not a smart investment). Leaving more money gives greater flexibility and choice to descendants. If the intent is to force a timeshare on them--not have them sell it--that seems an unattractive legacy.



• A Massanutten timeshare is a highly regarded one so it's easier to trade out
  True perhaps, but if you are looking to trade it, why buy it in the first place?



• The resort's facilities (pools, ski slopes, golf, hiking trails, horseback riding, canoeing, gyms, ponds stocked for fishing, etc.) are wonderful
  True. Most places at which one takes a vacation are wonderful, that's why people go to them. We take vacations at different places because they are wonderful in different ways. Massanutten, for example, is not rich in history (though there is a Civil War battlefield a little distance away), is not near a big city (with all the options they carry for museums and other interesting places), is not near a beach, and does not present us with choices that are hard to find elsewhere. As nice as Massanutten is, as we told our salesmen, if we owned a piece of it we still wouldn't be back for ten years. There are too many other places to visit. From our house, in the same or less amount of time as it takes to get to Massanutten, we can reach the Great Smokies National park, Washington DC, Baltimore MD, the North Carolina Outer Banks, Williamsburg VA, Charleston SC, Raleigh NC, Atlanta GA, Myrtle Beach SC, Norfolk VA, Charlotte NC, Atlanta GA, the mountains of NC, Richmond VA, sites of more than a dozen minor and major Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, places to rock climb, hang glide, and whitewater raft, and on and on. Why would we tie ourselves to vacationing in Massanutten or any one place?



• Most of its accommodations sleep six which makes trading out easier
  Probably true. Sleeping six is not particularly appealing as we wouldn't generally plan on bringing other people with us on our vacations.



• The three rooms can each be sealed off which enables couples with kids to be sexually intimate (when that might be difficult when staying in a hotel)
  True but we can work that out anyway.



• Massanutten has Gold memberships (at an additional cost) that enable those members to use the 7,000 acre facilities anytime, not just during their scheduled vacation week.
  This is not useful for us since Massanutten is more than a five hour drive from our house and, except for skiing, all amenities the resort provides, and many others, are within a ten minute drive from our house. (Skiing is four hours away). Our own house, which we've already bought, is better located than the condo in the mountains.

4) Compelling Arguments Against Buying a Timeshare

The two key reasons not to buy a timeshare are cost and lack of flexibility. We were shocked to hear that the initial price we were given for a one week Massanutten timeshare was $18,500! (This price was subject to negotiation and quickly dropped a couple thousand dollars. By the time the salesman gave up on us he had cut it nearly in half).

Buying 1/52 of a three room condo for $18,500 means the property (if bought for the year) would sell for $962,000. If you were going to spend nearly a million dollars on a property, you wouldn't spend it on a 3 room condo no matter where it was located. In addition to the purchase price, there is a $360 per year charge for the timeshare to cover taxes and maintenance costs. This projects to a yearly tax/maintenance fee for the property of $18,720. That is nearly ten times the amount we pay on our house which is three times the size of the condo.

This is a significant amount of money that is being placed in an acknowledged poor investment. (We saw people on the Internet trying to sell their Massanutten timeshares for $5000.) The timeshare is even more expensive if one considers its hidden cost: lost interest. In a decent investment vehicle, the money not spent on a timeshare could double every few years; one is unlikely to even get back the money one puts into a timeshare. (People anxious to get out of their timeshares, dump them at a loss. A buyer's market means the sellers, unless they are organized like timeshare selling corporations, are going to take a beating.)

Besides the cost, timeshares are inflexible. You get the same week (from some specified time on a Saturday or Sunday to some specified time and day the following weekend) at the same place every year. (Some of the time you spend there will have to be spent in cleaning up the place at the end of your week.) One can add flexibility by adding cost and trading weeks or locations. These logistical changes are handled by the parent timesharing organization to which you belong (and to which you pay a $79 yearly fee) for a per change fee of $126. This is presented as good news by the timeshare salesperson. "You can stay for a week almost anywhere in the world in nice accommodations for just $126." Sound attractive? Remember you pay $360 in taxes and maintenance fees for the year, $79 for membership dues, in addition to the $126 for changing your timeshare. So the one week accommodations cost is now $565 or $80 a night for a nice place that you are still locked into (i.e., you can't, without additional significant cost, arrive and leave midweek or stay in one place a few days and move to another place some driving distance away to continue your week's vacation). You also have to plan timeshare exchanges like this far in advance (years in some instances).

Other than when we are staying with friends, we almost never stay in the same accommodations for a full week of our vacation, we rarely arrive and leave on weekends, and we choose where we will stay shortly before arriving, sometimes not until we arrive as our vacation plans are extremely flexible and fluid. Unless we are visiting friends, we seldom vacation in the same place twice. We would not take a timeshare if it were offered to us for free. It will cost us upwards of $700 a year for one week of vacation (when the costs of some of the desired flexibility is added in; note that some desired flexibility like short term notice is unavailable at any cost in the timeshare world). We've never even spent $400 for a week of vacation accommodations, and we currently vacation with nearly complete flexibility. Admittedly, the places in which we pay to stay are not as furnished as the timeshares, but accommodations are not the point of vacations. We travel to see sights (historic or famous), to experience new things, and to immerse ourselves in different cultures or communities, not to be more comfortable when we are done vacationing for the day.

If you are not given a timeshare for free, you are paying a lot more for that week of vacation. If you invested the $18,500 used to buy the timeshare at just 6% interest, you would make $1,110 annually. That means, in lost money, you are spending an additional $1,110 for your one week each year of vacation accommodations. That plus the earlier taxes, fees, etc. put your total weekly vacation accommodation bill at roughly $1,700. Ouch!

5) Characteristics of a Hard Sell

I believe the real reason so many people buy timeshares is not because of the "guaranteed vacation" or the lure of being able to own a piece of an exotic place--the main rational and emotional arguments for timeshare ownership. I think the two primary reasons people buy timeshares are that they don't think through the downside of buying (for example as presented above) and they are overwhelmed by the hard sell.

These are some of the characteristics one can expect to see before and during a timeshare hard sell.

Misleading information and flat out lies - When we were invited to visit Massanutten we questioned whether or not this would be a timeshare sell job. We were assured it was not, it was just a chance for us to see the resort so we would tell our friends about it. At Massanutten, we were given misinformation on the level of flexibility one has when trading out a timeshare week ("this year they are changing it so you can break your week into portions when trading it"--if true we were not told at what cost), we were shown incorrect math, and we were lied to about resale value. When we mentioned we saw an Internet ad to sell a Massanutten timeshare for $5,000 compared to their initial offer of $18,500, we were told that sale would not include any of the Massanutten amenities. I don't believe that's true and if it were, we were being sold something we can never resell. When selling, it matters little what is said or lied, what matters is what appears in the contract. Had we to do it again, we would ask for an unsigned contract so we could see the legal limitations of owning a timeshare. If a person trying to sell you property objects to your getting legal counsel before buying (which you could only do if you took an unsigned contract away with you or brought legal counsel with you to the timeshare), you know right then the deal is a shady one.

An "unbelievable deal" (just between you and the salesperson) - At one point, late in our "negotiations",, the primary and experienced salesman sitting with us looked around and leaned in over the table, talking quietly; "I'm the only one in the room who knows about this. A couple just got rid of,...er...we just bought back a property because they are buying up to a bigger place. They already took their vacation this year so I can sell it to you cheap. I can let you have it for $9,900 but you can't take a vacation in it until 12:01 AM on January 1st, 2002." He punctuated this number and data by writing it on a legal pad in front of us. The jaw of the other salesman, who had already bought two Massanutten timeshares, dropped to the table. "That's way less than I paid!" He got a hint of his having been ripped off by the company for which he works.

Phony math - Our salesman wrote a lot of numbers and did a lot of math on the legal pad laid before us. "Trust me and my math" was his implicit message. Fear of math or of looking math-incompetent may be common in our society but neither apply to Missy or I. We love math and churning numbers and we are good at it. Few of our salesman's arguments ("I did the numbers, the longer you have it the better off you are") carried mathematical truth and we sometimes corrected his simpler errors. Writing on the legal pad seems to have multiple purposes. It provides something for people who are more visual (our salesman was drawing pictures as well as writing numbers), it enables a math challenge (from which most would back down but not admit it), and it gives one a sense of black and white "it's on paper" sureness about an offer that is of highly questionable value.

Redefinition of terms - "Timesharing" was redefined for us. When you are renting an apartment, or leasing a car, you are (in this new definition) "timesharing." The intent of the redefinition was to make us more comfortable with the concept of "timesharing", the result was to make us more distrustful of the salesman.

Pressure to buy now - Though a timeshare is admittedly not a good investment vehicle, we were told of the "great deals" people made by buying before the prices jumped. This seems a self-contradicting claim. If the prices can jump, assuming you can sell at the jumped prices, it is a good investment. This pressure can easily be thwarted by saying, "I don't buy property without first running the contract past my lawyer." Indeed strict adherence to this statement can be used to cut short the time spent in the sales pitch (though you would likely get phone calls later on to try to resell, perhaps with modified contracts.) Even if you are interested in buying a timeshare, you can't do a purchase justice without first shopping around. A timeshare costs about the same as a new car. When buying a car, you research the models. You read about them or talk with people who have them. You check around for prices. A timeshare deserves even more research because it islonger term. It would be unwise, even foolish, to buy from the first salesperson who is offering you the only model they have to sell.

"Trust me I'm your friend" - Since there is a pool of people having to take tours and a pool of salespeople to give them, salespeople are matched up (when possible) with potential customers with whom they have something in common (e.g., they have the same last name, they come from the same city or state, they have relatives or friends that live near you, etc.) This is supposed to give them a stronger connection with you. These people are not your friends and they are not doing something nice for you (though some of them may think they are). They are trying to make you do something (buy a timeshare) that you did not want to do. They will profit handsomely if you buy and you will lose. If they make the typical 5-10% sales commission, they can make roughly $1,000-$2,000 for two to three hours of easy but distasteful work. Their being overpaid bumps up the price of the timeshare which means it comes out of your pocket. If a friend sold you something you later regretted, a friend would take it back and return your money. Would these salespeople?

Find the more receptive spouse - Timeshare salespeople always want both spouses present during their hard sell. This doubles their chances of finding a receptive ear. If the husband seems set against buying, they turn their attention to the wife and take the position that they are supporting her in this good deal for her. This may frequently be successful since it seems many couples are in disagreement about more things than in which they agree. "If hubby is taking the position of 'don't buy' then I'd better take the position of 'buy,' plus here are some people who are standing against my hubby already." If they can make it spouse vs. spouse, the sale is more likely to happen as the spouse in favor of not buying is outnumbered at least 2 to 1 (we actually had two salesmen so the forces would have been 3 to 1). In the failed gang-up attempt on me, the salesman accused me of failing to be "open and perceptive." Those are almost universally considered two of my strongest traits.

Keep coming from the same or different angles - Hard sell salespeople are relentless in their pursuit of the sale. We'd think we closed on a topic such as "a Gold membership (geared towards local residents) is not good for us because Massanutten is so far from our house", and that topic would come back again ("we'll cut another $1,000 off of a Gold membership"). This shotgun approach is intended to overwhelm and it is hoped by the seller that some sown seeds bear fruit. Everytime a point was reintroduced, we noted that we had already discussed that and that it was not building a case for buying. Red herring arguments were sometimes introduced before an already closed point was reopened.˙

Dictate the discussion - When we raised some of the compelling reasons not to buy a timeshare listed above, the salesman redirected the discussion to some point he wanted to press. One item that came up but on which we couldn't get an answer was how some people who had a timeshare got multiple vacation weeks on it. Was that just negotiated? (For example, giving us one week a year on a $9,900 timeshare sounds like less of a deal than two weeks on an $18,500 timeshare for the same place.) Our salesman claimed to have four weeks of vacation on his Massanutten timeshare. He never told us how he got that.

Don't give up trying to sell while the potential Customer is still there - We could have cut our time with the salespeople short by leaving earlier. The salespeople bank on the fact that people won't be rude and leave in the middle of a discussion. I enjoyed my first exposure to a timeshare hard sell so I didn't mind a longer experience. In contrast, I am quite short with telemarketers as I've experienced them many times. In the future, I would cut the timeshare sales pitch short and not feel badly about appearing "rude" to someone who is trying to get me to do something I don't want to do (i.e., someone who is being rude to me). I would actually be helping them save time they would otherwise waste in an unsuccessful sales effort. Accepting the invitation to Massanutten, we were only obliged to take a 90 minute tour. The sales pitch started after an hour tour and it lasted 90 minutes. (In the end, the salesman "got it" and he got up and left us.)

6) Conclusion

I hope to get more timeshare invitations. In addition to the four day three night vacation (which included accommodations, use of the Massanutten facilities, 36 holes of golf (which we didn't use), and two adult extended day ski lift tickets--all totaled a $300 value), we got three Blockbuster rentals, three nights' accommodations in Orlando, and a $25 gift certificate at Chilies. Even though we have no intention of buying a timeshare, the corporations who sell them still benefit from our visits. They get an advertising expense tax write-off and they make money on things we buy while there (in this case, we still spent over $200 in lift tickets and equipment rentals for the three days we were on the slopes). The only people who lose out are the salespeople who host us. At Massanutten, our two hosts had no chance in closing a deal and they didn't understand that until they had spent two and a half hours with us.

Invitations to visit a timeshare are not something to avoid. If you go into the situation well-prepared, they can be a good investment of your time. For us at Massanutten, we received over $500 worth of things we used or will use for two and a half hours of our time. In the future, we'll spend even less time during the sales pitch. This one was a fun learning experience.

© 2001 frantzml@juno.com