During a recent Timeshare Board Members Association (TBMA) webinar, Lemonjuice Capital Solutions executives (pictured from left) Scott MacGregor, senior vice president and chief operating officer, and Jan Barrow, vice president of business development, spoke with Shep Altshuler, TBMA president, about the use of objective owner surveys.
An edited version of the conversation follows. Although it was directed to an audience of owners’ association board members and resort managers, every timeshare owner also should read it. In today’s data-driven economy, consumers are bombarded with surveys, and many have become survey-averse. Now comes a survey from your timeshare resort that is all too easy to ignore—but MacGregor and Barrow explain at length how surveys work and why all owners should respond.
The importance of owner surveys
MacGregor: Our owners deserve options, and we don’t want our owners to fall prey to relief scams. So, what’s that got to do with surveys?
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the timeshare business is that we’ve created these products and policies that make owners feel as if they’re trapped in an obligation they can’t get out of, so they end up turning to these relief companies in huge numbers. They pay thousands of dollars in hopes of escaping their timeshare.
A lot of what we do at Lemonjuice is provide boards and owners with better alternatives, and the best outcome is that owners are in a vacation-ownership product that works better for them.
What we’re going to talk about today is perhaps the most important two-way communications tool that boards have to engage with their owners and absolutely to eliminate the forces that drive them to these relief companies.
Surveys can help boards to deliver the promise that we’ve made to our owners to help them get the most out of their vacations for themselves and their families.
Why are surveys necessary?
Altshuler: Not only are they necessary, surveys are critical to the health and welfare of every association and every owner.
Barrow: Surveys gauge your owners’ views and how they experience the resort. Many times, we stay in our own circles and comfort zones, which lead us sometimes to be the last to know, and in some cases, maybe never knowing, until it’s too late, that owners are very discontent, or not paying fees and not traveling to your resort and their resort.
A survey done right will provide valuable information and hard numbers for you to act upon.
It’s also a non-intruding and non-intimidating environment. People can sit behind their computer or at their desk to take a survey. It gives your owners voice, and it’s about the owners and what they want.
Being engaged with your owners with surveys is a sign of good governance. We all know timeshare association boards have some of the highest levels of fiduciary responsibility. What better way to show your owners that you’re taking your responsibilities seriously by finding out what they want or think. Your surveys show that you’re focused on the need of your owners and are ready to act.
One complaint, or many?
Many times boards are focused on one owner’s complaint, and before you know it, the whole board meeting has been taken up about that one owner’s complaint. Then, when the board or the resort manager digs deep into the issue, they find out it’s maybe one or two owners that have a certain issue or are or being very vocal about something that’s going on at the resort or not going on at the resort.
But what about all those owners that you don’t hear from? Those are the ones that you need to get to because the silent ones are often the ones that can be your best friend or they could be leaving. You need to take a proactive step and make sure that you are surveying on a regular basis.
Also, you can drive the message. You can look at crafting the message or educating on a very complex subject. It’s a decision-making tool that can help you decide where to allocate your resources. It’s a multi-functional tool that is grossly underused in our space.
If you don’t learn what your owners want and need before others do, somebody else will. So, if you’re not asking and engaging your owners and you’re not querying them, surveying them, somebody else will be.
Owner attrition is a problem at most legacy resorts. A lot of that is caused by relief companies, and other external forces such as Airbnb or VRBO. They’re constantly reaching out to your owners through online remarketing and advertising in heavy vacation markets, billboards for owners to take action, and radio and TV ads. We’ve all seen them.
Imagine what things would be like if we had started asking our owners what they wanted in mid-2000, before the relief companies became so active. Imagine how different our industry would look.
Bursting information bubbles
Barrow: I’m suggesting to boards that they take the road less traveled. There’s tons of tools to do surveys that can effectively ask your owners what they want. You can’t address an issue if you don’t know what it is, and you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
MacGregor: We all get trapped in our own information bubble. We often find that what we think or believe is reinforced by the things that we hear, and certainly that happens in timeshare governance. We hear from the same people very often. They may be people who share our thoughts or concerns, and that reinforces what we think.
As board members—and both Jan and I are board members—we have a fiduciary obligation to serve the best interests of the majority of our owners, not just the vocal minority. That’s one thing these survey tools will do. Very often, we may think that we’re on the right path, without realizing there’s a better way to get to where we’re going, or maybe even a better destination ahead than we had imagined.
So, we’re going to show that these owner surveys are roadmaps to help reveal to you the best routes to get where you want to go, and also the best objective for you, your board, and your owners.
The art and science of surveys
MacGregor: For a number of years, I was chairperson of the ARDA Research Committee, the body that collects data on the timeshare industry at a high level and then publishes and uses that information for policy- and decision-making. I’m still a very active participant and it’s been a terrific learning experience.
It’s really helped me to appreciate that surveys aren’t just something we get in the mail and we check some boxes. It’s not just someone asking us for information. If we do this right, it’s a great method of two-way communication.
There are some rules to follow, some things to know, some alternatives to consider when you’re forming them. It also takes some creativity. With a little thought and a little thinking outside of the box, you can create a rewarding survey conversation with your owners.
Process, tools, and formats
Like any process, a survey starts with the end in mind. We establish the goal of figuring out what information we want to convey and what information we want from our owners. It may be in the context of a specific project, or owners’ input to strategic planning for the next three, five, or seven years.
Once we know what we want to accomplish, how do we get there? What are the questions that we’re going to pose? And what’s the information that we’d like to get back from the owners? That process will help guide you through the types of questions that that you can answer.
One important thing to emphasize is that many ways exist to elicit information from people with whom you’re having a conversation. You can ask them a direct question. Do you think the answer is A or B? Would you like us to invest in new tennis courts, or should we do pickleball courts? Those are direct questions.
You may offer a range of answers, which gives you a range of tools to use. You might ask, on a scale of 1 to 5, how interested are you in keeping your timeshare? Or selling your timeshare?
You can also ask indirect, open-ended questions to which people may feel more comfortable. For example, how do you plan to use your timeshare over the coming years?
The direct questions are the ones for which you just want a yes or no, or a check A, B, C, or D—but the indirect questions tease out what people really think and what they want.
Survey channels
MacGregor: The survey method you use is also important, and obviously the more people who respond, the more meaningful your survey is, the more valid the data you collect. So, you want to use multiple channels.
Some terrific tools are available. Hopefully you’ve got a robust website and you’re collecting and harvesting e-mails from all of your owners. One outcome of this past pandemic year with all of us cocooning behind our computers is that we’re much more accustomed to communicating with our owners via e-mail or electronic methods. It’s critical. Your website is a great place to advertise an available survey if you have the wherewithal to incorporate it into your website.
Online tools such as Survey Monkey are free or inexpensive, very easy to use, and something with which everyone is familiar. Of course, a free service tends to have some gimmicks in it, such as Survey Monkey advertising, but it’s a great off-the-shelf tool to create a survey.
A more helpful resource is Google Forms. All three of my kids in high school will use Google Forms to create surveys among their peers, socially and for academics. It’s a simple system to create surveys in multiple-choice formats, and it gives you immediate, real-time responses and graphic interpretations.
You can hire companies to help you create, format, deliver, compile, and use your surveys.
Of course, e-mail is another way to elicit responses.
So is snail mail. Some people still prefer to open a paper document, check the boxes, stick it back in an envelope, and send it back to you. Then we want to make outbound phone calls to chase the mail or just make sure that our team is aware of them. So, when our owners call to make a reservation or ask a question, we can ask them, “Have you received your survey, and have you taken the time to fill it out?”
Then, think about the survey format: direct, range, or indirect open-ended.
As you go down this hierarchy, gathering that information and putting it into a usable form becomes more complex, but you want a survey that incorporates all of these things. You’ll get much more response to the simple yes/no format, but you’ll get more valuable and deeper information from the range or the open-ended questions.
It’s both art and science, and it takes some planning, thought, and competent execution.
I want to re-emphasize one point here. We’re talking about questions and information. And we often think about surveys as asking people to give us information, but it’s the very best tool that a board of directors has to communicate information as well. It’s a way for you to say, not only are we thinking about you, our relationship with you is important, and what you think is important to us. It’s a great way to introduce topics that may be difficult, such as a special assessment or the board thinking about strategic alternatives to invest owners’ money in the best possible ways.
This is a way to say, “Hey, folks, we’re thinking about this, it’s important. We want to hear from you about what’s important to you.” So think about a survey as a two-way communications tool.
Compiling, validating, analyzing results
MacGregor: We’ve done the survey, we’ve designed it, we’ve figured out how to deliver it, and now we start getting the responses—hopefully, a lot of responses. When we created the survey, we should have been thinking about how we’re going to compile these data as they come in. Are we going to use a spreadsheet, so we can count the responses? Are we going to put them into a database so we can cross-reference the answers?
We want to seek validity. Data validity is a statistical term. We want to make sure that we’ve accessed enough of the population, that we’ve collected enough responses from the specific cohort of people we wanted to survey, and that the number of responses is valid.
This isn’t a hugely scientific process, but we want to make sure it’s an inclusive process. To me, validity is that we’ve received responses from everybody in the owners’ association, not just the people we’re accustomed to hearing from, not just the high-season owners, the people who pay their bills on time, or even just the people who have e-mails. Validity, to me, means we’ve gotten information from a wide range of people so we have a wide range of views.
When we’re asking people for this information, confidentiality and security are really important. Everything is on a spectrum. We want to think about and communicate it. If we’re asking people for confidential information, we have to make it clear. This is confidential. Your information will be retained securely. We’re not sharing these data with other people.
We want to hear from you. We want your name on the survey. We want to be able to follow up with you if we have a question or if your answer is incomplete—but we want you to be confident that we’re not going to share your answers with other people unless we tell you that we’re going to do that.
We’ve done a number of surveys in which we tell people the answers to these questions will be compiled and shared with the other owners at your resort. Especially when we talk about sunset, resort restructuring, or re-imagining, we know owners want to share with each other what they think.
Compilation is easier for simple yes/no questions, harder as the questions become more complex.
You also want to be able to compare answers, so sometimes you may ask the same question in different ways to see if you get the same answer. That’s another way to validate your data, and it’s also important to compare the two answers and ask, “Did we ask the question clearly? And did we get clear responses from the people? Or did we just muddle it?”
Synthesis is the process of actually taking those data and turning the results into something actionable, putting it into a form that the board can use. They don’t want just a spreadsheet or a bunch of numbers. Charts and graphs are helpful. Graphs and colors help people to understand data much more easily. We want to make sure that when we’re synthesizing the data, we’re telling the story. We want the board to be able to say, “We hear you. We want to deliver what you’ve charged us to do.”
Following up
We might also think about secondary or follow-up questions. Maybe we got a mixed message from the owners. Maybe we got a clear message from our owners that, yes, we love our resort. We want to re-invest money into it.
Or maybe we think the board should consider other things to do with our property. We’re not getting there as often and it’s a great real-estate market.
So maybe what we’ve received from the first round, the first survey, is some helpful information or some guidance. Maybe we go back, summarize these initial findings, and ask one or two follow-up questions.
Now we want to make informed policy decisions to benefit the majority of owners. When we were instituting no-smoking policies, surveys were a great way to introduce the topic, get feedback, and demonstrate to the ownership base that most people actually did want it. Thus, we are now validated in putting this policy in place.
Evidence and education means that we’ve taken the time to research the question that we’re asking. We’ve educated our owners, and the owners have educated the board as to what they think. Because the board is listening, the owners will be less inclined to go to a relief company and say, “My board doesn’t care. I’m stuck with this thing forever. It’s just a never-ending spiral of maintenance fees.” With some options and some light at the end of the tunnel, owners will be more willing to stay.
These surveys and the resulting information should yield an actionable plan, and the owners should be satisfied with those actions, because they told the board in advance they would be.
That is the nuts and bolts of what to do, how to do it, what to do once you’ve done it, and then what to do after the fact. To bring it back full circle, it’s all about the owners—getting to the people behind the data.
We tend to think that data are a just a bunch of numbers, but remember, people are behind every one of these responses, and we’re asking them about their interest in selling their weeks or re-imagining their property, and we’re getting that information back.
Barrow: It’s all about the owners. But what are the data telling us to do? Do we need a special assessment? Do we increase maintenance fees? Can the owner base absorb another maintenance fee? Should we defer freshening up the shuffleboard court that nobody uses anymore? Have the owners lost that loving feeling now because they’re aged out or because their building is over 40 years old.
At Lemonjuice, one of our first steps in working with any resort is finding out what the owners want. We typically find that some high-season owners are very happy, and they say, go ahead, special assess us and fix the shuffleboard court while you’re at it, while other owners can’t travel like they used to, especially due to the pandemic. They’re recognizing that while summer rentals have picked up, and they are significant, it’s not going to last forever, so now is the time to make a new strategic plan.
Altshuler: Before we move on, I want to focus on special assessments, as some of these do require a vote by the owners. The survey becomes a very important tool when you need to have the owners’ approval to move forward. That can be for sunset provisions, which is critical and coming up soon. I hear about it from board members almost every day. It’s never too early to start the communications process and I just want to get your comments on critical issues that have to be planned over a longer period of time.
MacGregor: It’s a perfect example, because if we just send out a letter and say, “We’re going to do a special assessment,” often the assessments don’t have to be approved by the ownership. Sometimes they do, but if you just send that out cold, you’ll get a lot of angst, resentment, and pushback, whereas if we’ve asked the owners a couple of times about their thoughts on the project, use those follow-up questions, and educate them, by the time they have to make that choice they’ve had their questions answered. They’ve been able to provide their objections and you’re much more likely to achieve your goal. So that’s a perfect example, using surveys and two-way communications to put the topic out there, get feedback, and use that feedback to reinforce the choices that need to be made.
For more information on Lemonjuice Capital Solutions and owner surveys, contact:
Scott MacGregor – scott.macgregor@lemonjuice.biz
Jan Barrow – Jan.Barrow@lemonjuice.biz