Timeshare - A Journey into the Unknown


“Time-share – a journey into the unknown” tells the story of my ten years working and living in Tenerife as a sales representative and also my time spent in Cyprus, working as a sales manager in the timeshare industry. When I first mentioned to my friends and family about what I was proposing to do, they were horrified, because whenever the word ‘timeshare’ had come into our conversation on previous occasions, it had always conjured up words like ‘con’ and ‘crooks’, primarily because of media publicity, but if truth be known I knew very little about the industry at the time, apart from the fact that they had posh resorts and that it cost a small fortune to buy a share in one of them! This I had learned several years earlier, after being accosted by a ‘scratch-card’ ticket-tout (more affectionately known in the industry as an ‘O.P.C.’ – though lord knows what this abbreviation stands for?) The gentleman who had taken me and my partner around several magnificent resorts in Marbella, was very courteous and obviously quite knowledgeable about how to get the best out of the R.C.I. (Resorts Condominium International) exchange system and he had half-convinced me that it was worth buying a timeshare, but with my bank-balance already severely over-drawn and my credit-card at its maximum limit, I was most certainly ‘not’ in a position to afford the opportunity of owning one – no matter how much his manager had dropped the price down to in the two hours that we were in his showroom!


Now it was my turn to learn how to ‘create the dream’ and ‘sell’ the concept to prospective buyers. I would learn all about ‘open-ended’ and ‘closed’ questions, ‘tie-downs’ and ‘buying signals’, and a host of other fact-finding questions to ‘test the water’ throughout my four-hour presentation. At the ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ of my tour I would sit quietly and listen patiently while my manager presented an array of ‘trial closes’, ‘silent closes’, ‘alternative closes’- and even a ‘porcupine close’, which would hopefully assist me in getting a sale at the end of the day. In time I would learn all of these things and as the months progressed my confidence increased, as I learned more and more about the industry and its resorts, not only from my mentors, but also from the members themselves, most of whom, I have to say, were not only enthralled with their holidays, but also ‘proud’ of their ownership – and invariably on the lookout to buy some more! Timeshare had progressed over many years, from the original concept of ‘quarter-shares’, (13 weeks) which began in 1966 (I believe), to ‘single week’ ownership which thrived throughout the seventies and eighties – and now in the nineties, holiday ‘points’ were all the rage it seemed – and that is what I sold to my clients.



Getting to know the people sat in front of you was the most important factor of the whole game and listening very carefully to their wants and needs was paramount, otherwise you would be wasting your time, because if you did not want to listen to what they were saying – then why should they listen to you? “Telling, not selling” is the phrase we used when a sales rep’ was found guilty of ‘spurting-off at the mouth’, bawling about what he had to sell – without first asking the people what they might want to buy – and the old adage of ‘two ears, one mouth’ was often said to me by my manager in the early days, because I found it so difficult in learning how to ‘shut my gob’ for five minutes, sit gently back in my chair and hear what the customer had to say! When our training manager first told us that we all had to learn about the A.I.D.S. principle, I was taken-aback, but then he immediately explained that the letters stood for ‘Attention’, ‘Interest’, ‘Desire’ and ‘Sale’.


“To get the peoples attention, you must ‘warm-up’ the client first, by talking to them as if they were already your friends -and always offer to help them in any way that you can. As soon as you have their attention, you must then gain their interest, so share a few ‘third-party’ stories with them, about you, your life, your travels – and anything else which is both interesting -and also funny wherever possible, but don’t bore them - and never turn a ‘friendly chat’ into a one-sided conversation. The ‘desire’ must be created by you –and this is where your selling skills come into practice. We call it ‘sizzling’, because now that they are warm, you will need to get them ‘on the boil’ and the only way that you are going to do that is by finding-out their ‘hot-spots’, in other words where they would literally ‘die for’ to visit –and then it is up to you to put them in their own little ‘paradise’. Your books have the pictures, but you must conjure up the ‘magic’, to make them feel as if they were already experiencing that dream holiday – and then all that is left is to show them how it works, bring your manager onto the table to give the clients a price – and if you have done your job properly -and the people can afford it of course, you will have your ‘Sale’ – that is what we call the A.I.D.S. principle”.


“To learn all the ‘tricks of the trade’ and to know how to use the system to the owner’s best advantage, you would have to have a brain like a Philadelphia lawyer” I was told in the early stages of my career and so I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about exchanges, points values, hotel ratings, saving and borrowing of points, cancellations, rentals and anything else I could muster about this lucrative game of chance. I then passed this information onto my clients, because I soon learned that the biggest problem in our particular field of ownership was actually the member’s lack of knowledge on how to use their points correctly. With regard to the other systems, salesmen and companies out there, well I am sure that they will have their own stories to tell, but this is my story, a simple tale about the characters I met in work, the many clients who became great friends of mine –and the down-right bizarre people I met along the way, such as the woman with a split personality, who liked me but hated my boss with a vengeance, and the nymphomaniac, who wanted to bed every male rep’ who came knocking at her door!