Tweet
Hotel prices have increased in some ways...but in other ways they have decreased. Five years ago you had to call the hotel and wheedle the best price you could out of them. Now you can use Hotwire or Priceline and get really unbelievable deals. We're going to Pittsburgh in April and we got a three-star hotel for $42 a night. Best price on the internet without Priceline is $150 per night. Of course here at TS4Ms we're mostly all the types to work the system and find the best deals.
The downside of that $42 per night is that you have to depend on the kindness of the hotel management to give you a room with two beds, to give you a nonsmoking room, to give you a clean, decent room.
If you're an owner at a T/S, they do at least treat you nicely at that timeshare. Usually.
In strictly dollars and cents terms, I'm sure I could do better at hotels, often even getting two rooms for less than the per-night price I pay for the timeshares, between the maintenance fees, the lost-opportunity costs of the initial investments, and the exchange fees. But the timeshare rooms are bigger, we can spread out, and they force us to go on "real" vacations to places we would never get our lazy selves to if we didn't HAVE to use those T/S weeks. So I'm thinking it's worth it for us. But it's more of an emotional advantage than a financial advantage.
The downside of that $42 per night is that you have to depend on the kindness of the hotel management to give you a room with two beds, to give you a nonsmoking room, to give you a clean, decent room.
If you're an owner at a T/S, they do at least treat you nicely at that timeshare. Usually.
In strictly dollars and cents terms, I'm sure I could do better at hotels, often even getting two rooms for less than the per-night price I pay for the timeshares, between the maintenance fees, the lost-opportunity costs of the initial investments, and the exchange fees. But the timeshare rooms are bigger, we can spread out, and they force us to go on "real" vacations to places we would never get our lazy selves to if we didn't HAVE to use those T/S weeks. So I'm thinking it's worth it for us. But it's more of an emotional advantage than a financial advantage.
We also live in a cold winter climate area (it is not all sunshine & palm trees in the golden state
) & would like to be snowbirds for much of the winter. We now own 10 floating week timeshares at an annual cost of about $5276 in MF & taxes. Because some are lock-offs we can get a minimum of 12 weeks per year with no additional fees. Our fees are generally fairly high because we own in Hawaii, California, Arizona & Nevada. They are all Gold Crown resorts. So for $440 per week. we can spend the entire winter in those much warmer locations & in most cases we are in at least a 1 bedroom full kitchen top quality condo. When winter is over we can return to our slice of California paradise in the Sierra mountains. We don't have to worry about our non existant 2nd home being unoccupied & needing maintainence or getting vandalized & such. Granted there is no tax write-off for our 2nd home, but there is not much headache involved either.
Hopefully my limit gets lower soon so I don't get the deal before I get too many more TS!
Give me a place with 4 S's: Sun, sand, surf, & suds-Dale (from Illinois)
Comment