Q4) Choose One Topic from Today's Lecture that You're Interested; Do further Research and Provide Real Life Examples

Vacation ownership, also called timeshare. It is the fastest growing segment of travel industry. This is mainly about the usage of a property, and usually, that property is a resort condominium. The right of using that property is separated and be held by several parties, and each holder is assigned for the usage of a period of time. Customers can pay an one-off payment and yearly maintenance fee to gain the access to that resort. Inside this system, every time when a customer pays, the account he owns gain points, those points serve the purpose of money and can be used to make purchases.

There are a lot of advantages of paying for vacation ownership, including high-quality accommodations, flexibility and etc. Also, the best thing of vacation ownership is that the wide range of vacation ownership products can suit many different kinds of people’s needs. There are different types of purchasing about vacation ownership, customers can buy a timeshare, rent a timeshare, and even sell his timeshare.

Renting timeshare

This method allows the owner or owners to rent out the right of usage of the property to someone else for money as return. As there may be many renters looking for the suitable period of time and place to spend their holidays, there are many agents(referring to vacation ownership websites) to act as the ‘middle guy’ to arrange for both of the owner and the renter, work exactly the same as travel agents.

Buying and selling timeshare

Timeshare is always considered as a real property and the ownership of it can be transferred. Surprisingly, many owners of timeshares do not think the value of their properties are growing and therefore a lot of timeshares reselling prices are deep low but come along with a relatively high maintenance fee. As rental of timeshares, there are agents who assist their clients in reselling timeshares. Those agents make profit from the commission of every successful case of the timeshares reselling.

Real life example

Vacationownership.com is one of the most popular website that people search up and make purchases. They provide customers with service from licensed real estate agents. Their selling point is that they do not only know how the process should go, but the uniqueness of every product which fits their customers and which does not. As mentioned in the above paragraph, most of these websites provide the three kinds of ownership transferal services, and this is no exception for vacationownership.com. 

This website mainly focuses on the customers from North and South America. According to statistics, Americans and Canadians are the main source of tourists who visit countries in the North and South America. In the tab of Destinations, the popular cities include Orlando, Las Vegas, and Cabo San Lucas. Most of the functions from it are the same as websites such as Priceline and Zuji, however; there is a distinctive function that distinguish it from those websites, which is the Usage Type. Browsers can choose from the range of once a year, up to 4 times a year, or even once every three years. After choosing from this filter, the website will automatically filter the resorts which fit into. 

References

http://www.arda.org/uploadedFiles/ARDA/News_and_Information/Industry_Information/VacatonOwnership[1].pdf
http://www.vacationownership.com/search/rentals/
http://www.starwoodhotels.com/promotions/promo_landing.html?category=SVO_main
https://www.myclubwyndham.com/ffr/inside/products.do
https://www.marriottvacationclub.com/timeshare-ownership/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeshare