Strong potential for Malta's timeshare
by Franco Aloisio
Despite being marred by the negative tactics of its marketers, timeshare is a great concept. For people who like to go on vacation and want the luxury of a home, timesharing is the financial answer; you can afford to buy a piece, whereas, perhaps you cannot afford to buy the whole.
Through timeshare, one can buy a week or two in a particular resort for a number of years, usually 30 or more. There are even people who buy timeshare for life. Hence, thanks to timeshare, one avoids the yearly expense of maintaining and furnishing a totally owned luxury vacation home.
When one talks about timeshare, one refers to sharing the whole condominium unit with other owners. Usually, there are about 50 owners per unit, that is one owner for each week of the year, leaving a couple of weeks for maintenance and refurbishing.
One can return to his or her home resort every year or trade one's week to over 5000 destinations worldwide. There are two major exchange companies worldwide - Resort Condominiums International (RCI) and Interval International.
A press trip on timeshare was recently organised by RCI together with the Maltese Timeshare Association - OTE Malta and Air Malta. Members of the press were given the opportunity to visit the RCI headquarters in Kettering, Britain and tour a number of fantastic country timeshare resorts. The resorts which were visited were the Barnsdale Country Club in Rutland and Walton Hall in Warwickshire.
The RCI headquarters offers an extremely professional service to worldwide timeshare owners. Such owners, especially those living in Britain, contact RCI whenever they want to exchange their timeshare slot. For instance, if a Briton owns one week of timeshare in Malta, he or she can decide to exchange that week with a week in Tenerife, Orlando or any other destination in the world. This is RCI's job.
RCI's PR manager Sue Colby explained that RCI was founded in 1974 and is today part of the Cendant group, the world's leading consumer and business services organisation. Ms Colby said the timeshare exchange concept was invented by RCI. In 1999, RCI sent seven million people on holiday, while carrying out two million exchanges over 3,605 resorts. Based in the US, RCI has offices worldwide and has attracted several top brands and developers such as Hilton GVC, Ramada, Westin, Shell Group, Club Hotel and Sheraton.
Ms Colby said the top non-US destination is Europe, followed by Mexico/ South America, the Caribbean, Australia and Canada (in that order). The favourite US destination is Florida. RCI handles a modern call centre, and is currently moving some of its operations to a state-of-the-art £25m call centre in Cork, Ireland. The RCI Kettering headquarters employs 650 people.
Throughout the trip, Malta's strong potential for timeshare was often emphasised. At present, Malta attracts around 100,000 repeat timeshare tourists - 10 per cent of total tourist arrivals. This section of the tourism industry has expanded considerably in the last 10 years. Malta has four Golden Crown timeshare properties - the Mistra Village complex in St Paul's Bay, the Radisson SAS Bay Point Resort in St Julian's, the Qawra-based Coral Reef and the San Lawrenz Leisure Resort in Gozo. In all there are 25 timeshare resorts in Malta, of whom 20 are affiliated with RCI.
The benefits of timeshare to Malta are several. There is free marketing of the island through the exchange systems, members magazines and directories; guaranteed all year round occupancy; repeat and new tourists; better than average standard of tourist with more spending power; and long-term guaranteed business.
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