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Originally posted by JLB
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No exchange without the "e" before the x = Xchange -
For everyone who created an account: if you are adding an interval for exchange and can't find your resort in step 1, please post the resort name here and we'll add it ASAP. We'll be adding new resorts every day.Comment
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Scott I am calling you snooper for now on, Nice detective workOriginally posted by scootr5 View PostTimeshareforums Shirts and Mugs on sale now! http://www.cafepress.com/ts4msComment
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you dont pay me until after check out, I dont like that but I was all set to add several reservations to your available inventory as a test, until I saw this
A: Reservations are considered non cancellable and are not eligible for an account credit if: 1) The reservation has already been used (past the check-in date) 2) There is less than 48 hours remaining until check in
I own Club Wyndham points and the Club Wyndham cancellation policy is; no cancellations 15 days before check in. I also own Worldmark credits and their cancellation policy is no cancellations inside 30 days
so for me, there is too much risk that our customer might cancel in that 13 day window (Club Wyndham reservations) or the 28 day window (for Worldmark reservations) that would stick me reservation I cant cancel and for which Id get no compensation
I make these reservations up to 13 months in advance and they cost me money to hold until I find someone to rent them. I want to be paid as soon as possible. When I use a service like yours, I want to be paid when you get paid and I insist on being paid 30 days before check in... so this wont work for me
and then there is this
Interval Xchange is for personal use only. It is intended to assist users in recouping some of the expenses associated with booking a reservation they are unable to use or expenses associated with ownership of interval property. It is not intended to be used as a business or for any other commercial purpose. By using Interval Xchange, you agree to the personal nature of your use of the serviceComment
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Ron, thanks for your feedback, its very valuable and shows we need to work on better explaining our cancellation policy and how it affects both owners and renters:Originally posted by ronparise View Post
The cancellation policy you are referring to is applicable to the money the user who's reserving your property pays for the reservation, not the balance the owner earns. There are several scenarios here:
1) If the user/renter cancels the reservation request before the owner has a chance to change the name on the reservation and formally accept the reservation request (first 24 hours), the user's payment is voided and the owner doesn't get paid.
2) If the user cancels after the reservation request that has been already been confirmed by the owner, verified by IX and is eligible for an account credit, the balance you've earned will not be affected. The way our system is set up in this scenario is IX will take "ownership" (buy out) of the reservation and make it available at any reasonable price to minimize our loss (from paying the owner while also crediting the renter). Regardless of whether the interval rents or the price it rents for, the owner gets to keep the full balance.
As far as getting paid as soon as possible: Your IX account gets a credit for the full amount of the reservation cost immediately after we confirm the name change on the reservation to the name of the new guest. This balance can be used immediately to reserve other intervals on IX. However, when it comes to withdrawing the account balance to a bank account, we need to make sure the renter is able to successfully check in and use the reservation before letting the owner withdraw the balance. This is done to prevent any potential fraudulent intentions like adding intervals that don't exist. We can assure you that whether you plan on using the balance within IX or withdrawing it to a bank, the balance you earn is yours and no one will ever take it away from you as long as the renter had no problems using your interval. The only time we would ever penalize the owner if there was an obvious case of fraud.Comment
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Many timeshare resorts have stipulations barring owners from commercial use of their properties. We provide the disclaimer to ensure our users do not violate any of such policies or contractual obligations. What "commercial use" means is up to interpretation between you and your resort(s). We are certainly not in business of enforcing contracts between our users and third parties, we just provide the disclaimer. If any of our users would be in violation of such policies with their resorts, they would certainly be hearing from their resorts before they would hear anything from us. We are positive that 99.9% of timeshare owners did not buy their properties to get rich or use as a business so we don't see a big problem there. If you've let other people use your intervals and received payment for them in the past without any issues, there shouldn't be any now.Originally posted by ronparise View Post
Please let us know if you have any more questionsComment
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Dear members and admins of TimeshareForums, my name is Adam and I’m the CEO of Interval Xchange. I’d like to encourage all of you to actively participate in the discussion about how we can make Interval Xchange the service you use, love and tell your friends about.
The idea behind launching a beta product before an official public release is to give the most active and experienced members of the community an ability to participate in development, provide feedback and improve the product before its shown to the general public. How often do you get an opportunity to have a real say in how a service that lets you exchange your intervals for cash works? Nothing is set in stone at this point (we can literally implement anything we dream up) and any feedback or suggestions you provide about the look of the website, process of exchanging or reserving, terms & conditions or anything else, will be seriously considered.
This thread is viewed several times a day by everyone on our team and we are looking for valuable feedback to improve and fine tune the service for YOU. If there is a reason you are staying out of the discussion please let us know as well.
Last but not least. Don’t think that testing our service means spending money. As the matter of fact we are not expecting a single real financial transaction during this time. Moreover, we can easily turn on the “sandbox” environment for payments where transactions with fake credit card numbers (google Test Credit Card Account Numbers) will go though as if they were real, now how cool is that???
Timeshare industry has had its fair share of bad reputation and as JLB said earlier “Whatever it is can't be much worse than what already is”. So lets make it better together!
To get you guys started with some ideas, here’s a sneak peak of what we are working on right now:
1. We defiantly need a new logo, the one that’s on the site right now is just a placeholder and “best resorts just for you” is definitely not our mission statement. We will also move the logo to the top left to make more room for the destination search. Designers are working on that as we speak.
2. The “PROCESS” page will be redesigned as a timeline to give a more visual representation of how the exchange and reservation process works. The timeline will look something like this http://demo.trimatrixlab.com/material-cv/ (education & experience) sections. Turnaround time:1-2 weeks
3. There’s a bug when you click "Explore More" from the homepage, every resort shows “From $100” its supposed to show the minimum price of intervals that belong to this resort or show that there is no inventory available. This should be fixed by the time we wake up on Monday.
4. And there’s many more things we are working on which I’ll be happy to share, but we want to hear what would YOU like to see?
In conclusion, obviously no-one owes us anything or is required to help us out. But we are all in this boat together and if you help us improve our service we will return the favor by making your ownership experience more enjoyable.Comment
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I was in a review page of one of the resorts yesterday and the language wasn't English. That worried me.
Also, what does your slogan mean? "Exchange for Dollars! Not points". Isn't that the same as renting for dollars instead of exchanging your own time that you have with your resort?
Yesterday, I noticed another brand new website when I was in Facebook. Who are all these companies?Comment
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iconnections, thank you for the feedback.Originally posted by iconnections View Post
The "Reviews" section of resort pages has not been finished yet so we put lipsum (dummy) text there. If you google the term "lipsum" you can actually read up on some curious facts about this dummy text. Once the Reviews section is operational, the dummy text will be replaced by actual reviews.
The slogan means that typical timeshare exchange companies give you points for your exchanges, the amount of points is predetermined by the exchange companies and owners have no control over how many points they receive for their deposits, points eventually expire if remain unused and you can't withdraw points as cash. With IX each owner has the ability to establish the value of their interval in dollars and if its booked by another user, the dollar balance the owner receives may be withdrawn to a bank account or used to book other intervals and it never expires!Comment
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The website you've mentioned looks very nice, but in reality is a simple listing website with a membership fee, https://weholi.com/en/subscribe. Not that theres anything wrong with that + the membership fee seems to be very reasonable.Originally posted by iconnections View Post
Apart from us not having a membership fee, the biggest difference between us and this website is "under the skin". We didn't spend close to a year creating just another listing website. A ready made listing website template can be purchased for under $100 and be up and running in a few hours https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress/real-estate.
We've developed a whole new platform from the ground up to streamline and automate the process of buying and selling confirmed reservations. A platform like this didn't exist so we had to create it from scratch. Every little step of the process had to be planned and developed like the user account area, adding & withdrawing intervals, working with account balances, cancellation scenarios and so much more it would take me days to go through all of the website logic.Comment
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Thank you. I guess, I am old-fashioned because we only own weeks and use them every year! Most of our timeshares are fixed week/units and the only way to go, IMO. The resorts cannot manipulate the inventory in their favor.
I have heard that the parent company of Interval International (ILG) is working on a pure point system. They own several hotel brands already so I see them combining the point values of all these brands as that would make sense. I even heard that the Marriott too will have a different system next year so will they affiliate with the ILG PPS too once their II contract runs out?
This industry is constantly changing unless you own at an independent resort where the Board is for the benefit of their timeshare owners only. I have learned that all too well over the years.Comment
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Sounds very interesting and I wish you good luck. There is a demand for that with so many different point values between brand name and smaller independent resorts. It was a lot simpler when a week was a week in Red, White and Blue. We go back to the early 80s.Originally posted by Interval Xchange View Post
I'll keep following it.Comment
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Emmy, I completely agree that old fashioned weeks are the way to go. You don't have to compete with other owners for reservations, resorts can only sell each unit to 52 different owners... With points things become much more complicated and not always to the benefit of the owner. Other than bigger profits, moving to a point system or a travel club brings lots of legal advantages (less compliance and regulation) for resorts compared to selling conventional real estate (weeks).Originally posted by iconnections View PostComment
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Hi everyone, just a quick update:
With your help and feedback we've made lots of improvements to our website over the past month so Thank You! We now have a pretty sizable user base and we are starting to see more and more exchanges taking place. Now we just need inventory, lots of inventory!
If you have weeks or points you aren't using there's absolutely no risk to making them available on Interval Xchange. You establish your own asking price and if someone reserves your deposit, you earn a cash balance on your Interval Xchange account in the full amount of the reservation!
You always remain in control. Even if someone makes a reservation request for one of your deposits, you have the final say on whether to accept or decline the reservation request. You can also withdraw your deposit at any time without any penalty or obligation.
For all the skeptics out there
let us remind you that there's no cost to register or maintain an account on IX; there are also no deposit or exchange fees. The ONLY way we can possibly make money from you is if you withdraw your Interval Xchange balance (15% withdrawal fee), and thats only if you choose to withdraw your balance instead of using it to reserve someone else's week on Interval Xchange.
Sincerely,
Interval Xchange TeamComment
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It's all about inventory. I am doubtful that the inventory will be large enough to offer enough good choices based on previous similar attempts to develop a new exchanging alternative. Does anyone remember TimeshareJuice? This was a straight exchange system that differs from this new site's business model but I think it is close enough to it for the point of this post. I was a member there since the very beginning and I think I got one offer on my 2bdr SoCal September beach week in all of those years and it was not for something I would consider fair.Originally posted by Interval Xchange View Post
The point of my quote above is that without the particpation of people like Ron Parise, I think the same lack of trading possibilities could happen here. Ron, if you see this, can you comment on whether a 15 percent premium on your rental fees would keep you and other people like you away (assuming all of your other concerns had been addressed)?
I wish you the best of luck but I hope you have an innovative plan to get the inventory you need now and to keep it coming in the future. Relying on the average every day timeshare owner to drive your business has not been successful up to this point, in my experience.Comment
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