Chris Walker and Joe Takacs
Suite Vacations Club
“Suite Vacations is a travel and lifestyle non-equity travel-club membership,” explained Chris Walker, its chief operating officer. “It has nothing to do with the transfer of deeds or renting weeks. It provides discounted travel opportunities for a wide demographic of people – active seniors, travelers, families, couples, singles, business travelers, remote workers – pretty much anybody that wants to do any type of traveling. When I say it’s a non-equity type membership, it’s simply a wholesale-based travel-club membership.
“It’s a heavily discounted membership that’s available only through private membership where you have to join the club in order to have access to those travel benefits.”
“Suite Vacations provides a revenue-enhancement product that can be sold to [a timeshare resort’s] owners and guests, as well as to guests of owners, to exchange guests, to renters, to referrals, and to a wide range of people, without touching the deeds, without having to do any type of deed transfer, without requiring any type of ownership.”
A lease arrangement
Walker said the resort would generate revenues by offering this type of membership, because it would be structured as a lease arrangement. Suite Vacations provides the sales staff and everything else needed to market on-site, and would pay the resort a significant percentage of every sale that is generated.
“So we provide a great product for resort owners and guests. We drive newfound revenue for the resorts without any transfer of resort inventory or any resort expense, and we provide a great revenue-sharing and enhancement program to assist agent resorts with much-needed cash flow and additional revenue to help support other things that you might need to do, whether it’s improvements at the resort, staffing issues, or whatever.”
Walker said Suite Vacations seeks to provide a non-high-pressure sales environment. Instead of gifting people who attend sales presentations, the company offers a concept “for people truly interested in traveling and having a great travel experience.” It enables members to enjoy greater flexibility and more travel options, “and not be locked into something that they feel might burden their family.”
Adapting to change
An inter-generational family-transfer arrangement is one way to perpetuate ownership at a timeshare resort – but it’s not for everyone, said Joe Takacs, chief executive officer of The MVP Service, LLC, and TOWB, LLC. His companies are active in marketing and sales, rentals, and resort repurposing.
As owners age, he said, a resort must replace its owner base every generation. Ways of doing that include on-site sales, bulk sales, resales, and rentals.
“Half of the sales that I do are for an owner,” Takacs said. “If I can get an owner out and get somebody else in there, that’s a good thing. It’ll never hit the bottom line, but maybe that owner would have gone delinquent.”
Tapping into owners’ desires and expectations requires knowing what they think, and that requires technology, and professionals who can compile meaningful data, he said. “So get somebody to help you.”
For information on upcoming TBMA events go to: tbmassoc.org/conferences