In only five days (August 30th) you will have an opportunity to fully understand why happy timeshare owners are happy. That is the day my new book A Guide to Loving Your Timeshare: How to get the most for your money in family fun and experiences will be available on Amazon. At the launch you can get it for $0.99 on Kindle.
There are millions of happy timeshare owners who never get heard. I interviewed a bunch of them for the book. At three of my timeshare stays in southern California, I walked around the pools asking people to tell me about their experience with timeshare ownership. They were happy to tell their story. They were glad to see someone stand up and tell the truth about the great aspects of ownership.
I made a discovery that even surprised me. At the conclusion of every interview, I asked each person if they felt they got good value for their timeshare purchase and 100% of them said yes. I was very surprised that I couldn’t find a single person who thought their timeshare was too expensive. All the people who are unhappy with their timeshare cost must have stayed home. I wondered why the happy timeshare owners were here and the unhappy ones were at home.
I decided to put quotes from these interviews into the book. There was a lot of wise council from the happy timeshare owners. The final chapter of the book is titled Interviews with Happy Timeshare Owners. It is a collection of quotes, hacks, and bits of wisdom imparted from those who love and know how to use their timeshares. If everyone used their timeshares like these people, they would likely be happy as well. Following are a few of their quotes:
-I could never have stayed at such a fancy resort if I had to pay hotel prices.
-If you owned a vacation home, you would be paying property taxes, maintenance and repairs, and insurance. When you think about it that way, a timeshare is a real bargain.
-Timeshares are a very good and economical way to travel.
-Everything has its downsides, but timeshares have way more upsides than downsides.
-Even the sales people don’t know you can get lots of weeks of use out of one week of ownership.
-I inherited my timeshare from my mother, and I will pass it to my kids when I die.
-No one ever told us we could buy unlimited bonus time. Now we do it all the time. We bought this bonus trip for $68 a night, without using up the credits we own. Once you are an owner in the system, you can get a lot of extra benefits and vacations.
-We are currently traveling from Southern California up the Oregon Coast and back for 16 days, staying one to three nights at each stop, all for an average of $85 a night. You can’t beat that price.
-If you know what you are doing, you can milk a lot of vacations from this system.
-My family can travel for the rest of their lives and pretty much pay nothing.
-It’s ridiculous to own one week and only use one week. There is so much more available if you use the system.
-I love coming here. It has better accommodations for my wheelchair than hotels do. Hotel rooms are too small and cramped for me.
-RCI has over 4,300 places to go and we haven’t done them all yet, but we’re working on it.
-I’ve never stayed at a hotel on a vacation. They don’t compare to timeshares so I don’t bother.
-This is much more affordable than a hotel. We would have never been able to afford to do what we have done without owning a timeshare.
-I get robocalls asking if we are happy with our timeshare. When I say we love our timeshare, they hang up.
-We own a week in Hawaii with strong trading power and have always traded it and travelled all over the world. We’ve been to Italy, Australia, Mexico, Portugal, Hawaii, California, and Canada.
-We own one week and trade it for about six weeks a year.
-Makes great travel options during retirement.
-The people who don’t like timeshares just don’t know how to use them. If they knew how to use them, they would love them.
I think this gives you a good picture of happy timeshare owners. In the book there are 11 pages of these quotes from happy timeshare owners with many tips trick and hacks they shared to turn you into a happy timeshare owner.
Those who are unhappy, have never taken the time to learn how to use their timeshare optimally. It reminds me of when my mother-in-law inherited her husband’s iPhone when he passed away. Most people understand that an iPhone is a great and powerful tool. But she didn’t know how to use it so it was worthless to her. Over the next few months she began to learn how to use it. Now she can send texts, get pictures of her great-grandson, get calls wherever she is, and find information she needed. She has a different opinion of the phone now that she knows how to use it.
My mother-in-law was faced with two choices: She could decide the phone was useless and throw it away, or she could invest a little time and learn how to use the powerful tool she held in her hands. She chose to do the latter and now thinks a bit differently about the phone.
Unhappy timeshare owners face the same options. Gripe about it and throw the opportunity away, or learn how to get the most of it and enjoy and incredible opportunity right in your hands.
Knowing how to use something makes the item so much more valuable. Like what is depicted in this quote from the swimming pool interviews:
“When I first had my timeshare, I didn’t know how best to use it. Now I have the knowledge to get the most out of it, but it came from trial and error. I wish I had a book like you are writing when I first became a timeshare owner.”
The tiny cost of owning one book could change your life. Switching from being an uninformed timeshare owner, or possible timeshare owner, to one who knows the system could create a lifetime of great memories at a fraction of the cost of however you already vacation.
Once you know the tips, tricks, and hacks needed to get the most from your timeshare, a whole new world opens up. The single week of timeshare I own has opened me up to the possibility of travelling in a timeshare every week of the year.
