time share

A time share (1960s- ) is part ownership of a hotel or resort where people stay on holiday. Most are by the sea or in the mountains. You do not own a room outright, but for a given week of the year – you own a share of its time.

You can either go to that hotel and stay that week or you can trade it for a similar week in a similar hotel that is part of the same trading system. RCI is the largest and best known of these.

It is one of those things that sounds good in theory but rarely works out so well in practice.

The trouble is that the rooms that are up for trading are those that hotels cannot otherwise fill. So there always seems to be rooms everywhere except where you want to be. To get something close to what you want you have to book a year or more beforehand.

If you want a room in a large city like New York or London, forget it. The best you can hope for is a place an hour or so out of town by car.

The trouble is that city hotels are not part of the system, because they can always fill their rooms. It holds no attraction for them.

The hotels that are part of the system are those with a low season – a time of year when most of their rooms are empty. That is why so many are by the sea or in the mountains. For them the system is a way to get some money for empty rooms in the low season.

The empty rooms also offer a cheap way to market time shares: Hotels will offer to let you stay free for a weekend in the low season if you promise to bring your husband (they seem to write to wives, not husbands). In exchange you must hear one of their salesmen for 90 minutes.

The salesman tells you about time shares, how they work, about the hotel and its bright future and then shows you some of the newer rooms.

Unless you say “no” over and over and over again, the 90 minutes will easily stretch into four hours. It will ruin the day.

If you finally persuade him that “no” means “no,” he will send his manager to talk to you. He will offer you a better deal. But only for today – if you leave, the deal will be off the table.

If you tell him no, then he will send you to his manager – two levels up from the original salesman. He will ask, “What seems to be the trouble?” He might offer you an even better deal, but he seems more interested in how his sales force is doing.

They are like boys who sell watches on the streets of Bali: they think “no” means you are holding out for a better deal. And like them, if they sell nothing their family suffers.

See also:

• New York