My Analysis of SW Florida Availability

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

The following is my analysis of the next 24 months availability in SW Florida (Southern Gulf Coast). I am searching with four deposits, all of which used to be top traders, but that got devalued on 5/30 Black Saturday.

I don't claim to know all there is to know about SW FL resorts, but I do claim to know enough from my 20 years of experience and study of them to be able to draw accurate general conclusions.

First off, as has been stated several times elsewhere, I used to be able to see 600 (m/l) exchanges for the next 24 months. That figure dropped drastically during the RCI.com enhancement on or about May 30, 2009, and has never returned to the previous level. The following is as much about what is no longer available as it is about what is now available.

Here is the results of the search I just did 12/19/2009:

19 Resorts (260 available units)

# of Units by Resort Rank
The top 22 Resorts: 0
23: 5
25: 8
26: 2
29: 1
30: 4
34: 1
37: 4
38: 41
39: 24
40: 7
41: 1
42: 19
44: 3
46: 13
48: 2
49: 29
50: 28
52: 57
Unranked, but very poor: 11

Stated succintly, there is nothing available in the best 40% of the resorts, and 88% of what's available is in the worst 1/3 of the resorts.

Happy Holidays.

[akparsa Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close akparsa]

Can you explain what rankings you're referring to?

This is very interesting information! I've followed your thread on SW FL availability for awhile.

What is the source of the resort ranking you're using?

Thanks, Anita

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

Mine, similar to others. There is not much about SW FL resorts that I don't have evaluated, ranked, rating, listed, etc.

But, use anyone's. Google something like FL Resort ratings and you may be able to find some.

If you do, then do a search, then analyze it, you will get similar results regardless of whose ranking/ratings you use.

The best resorts are not available and the worst resorts are.

You could also evaluate availabilty using just two categories, Better and Lesser. In that case, 100% if what's available is at Lesser resorts.

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

Also, my list includes all affiliations (I have them sorted, also), and there are 53 resorts, so the last two on the list are pretty much the bottom of the barrel. I need a name for them . . . maybe the sediment resorts.

[akparsa Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close akparsa]

Bummer!

I am not able to find any kind of ranking list by googling. I love reading the ratings information on TUG and had hoped your reference to rankings meant there was something similar here on ts4ms that I'd missed since I don't have any SW Florida experience personally.

Anita

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

I am not able to find any kind of ranking list by googling. I love reading the ratings information on TUG and had hoped your reference to rankings meant there was something similar here on ts4ms that I'd missed since I don't have any SW Florida experience personally.

Anita

Other than me, for SWFL, I don't know of any ratings/rankings here, but there are reviews.

Tripadvisor is a place where you can get resort rankings; they get mixed in with hotels and motels . . . which seems appropriate any more, since so many non-timeshare owners stay at timeshares nowadays.

Of course, timeshare resorts are at a disadvantage on Tripadvisor because they do not offer the level of service that hotels and motels do.

[PigsDad Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PigsDad]

Stated succintly, there is nothing available in the best 40% of the resorts, and 88% of what's available is in the worst 1/3 of the resorts.

Perhaps this is where a lot of your Florida weeks have gone.

As a HGVC owner, I just received an email advertising this new (to me, at least) site that is renting SW Florida HGVC affiliate properties. It stated that HGVC members get a 25% discount off of the rental prices listed.

Kurt

[chriskre Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close chriskre]

Perhaps this is where a lot of your Florida weeks have gone.

As a HGVC owner, I just received an email advertising this new (to me, at least) site that is renting SW Florida HGVC affiliate properties. It stated that HGVC members get a 25% discount off of the rental prices listed.

Kurt

Did you see any prices? I only see a box that you have to put your info in to get more info. Is there a link to the prices?

[chriskre Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close chriskre]

See Jim,
Time to trade in your old weeks model for a newer HGVC model.

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

Perhaps this is where a lot of your Florida weeks have gone.

As a HGVC owner, I just received an email advertising this new (to me, at least) site that is renting SW Florida HGVC affiliate properties. It stated that HGVC members get a 25% discount off of the rental prices listed.

Kurt

I tried to pursue the disappearance of HGVC availability with one of the SW FL resort managers. She expressed an interest and was helpful, involving the regional manager.

It ended when she decided I should take my questions to corporate, but did not offer to forward it herself.

I still have the emails from the resort manager, so if anyone knows who I should send them to at HGVC corportate, let me know.

[SteveChapin Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close SteveChapin]

Did you see any prices? I only see a box that you have to put your info in to get more info. Is there a link to the prices?

If you click on a resort, there's a button to download the rate brochure. I attached it.

[alanmj Banned Find all posts View Profile Close alanmj]

An interesting thread. However, as usual in these types of discussions there are too many intangibles to determine precisely what is going on.

Perhaps the simple explanation is that those who own in the top 40% are not depositing their weeks with RCI any more. Fits the data. Given everything said about RCI these days, those with top weeks may view RCI as a poor investment for their weeks.

It would be a very useful exercise if someone who owned at one of those top 40% of resorts were to deposit a week and then see what happens to it. Does it disappear into rentals? Or does it appear for exchange in Points? Or does it appear for exchange in Weeks but only for those with the very best of traders - Summer SoCal or Manhatten Club (pretty much any week). Preferably, this should be done more than once by more than one person to compile statistics.

Any takers? Or are we going to continue to talk and debate ad nauseum - as we always do - in the absence of hard facts?

[SteveChapin Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close SteveChapin]

Perhaps the simple explanation is that those who own in the top 40% are not depositing their weeks with RCI any more. Fits the data. Given everything said about RCI these days, those with top weeks may view RCI as a poor investment for their weeks.

If I understand JLB's data correctly (not presented here, but in the past), no, it doesn't fit the data.

Pre-5/30 there was availability. Post 5/30 there isn't. That isn't explained by a lack of new deposits; those weeks went somewhere on 5/30 during the reconfiguration.

Now, I'm not disputing your point---I'm certainly not going to be putting prime weeks into RCI---it just doesn't explain Black Saturday from what I know of the situation.

[alanmj Banned Find all posts View Profile Close alanmj]

If I understand JLB's data correctly (not presented here, but in the past), no, it doesn't fit the data.

Pre-5/30 there was availability. Post 5/30 there isn't. That isn't explained by a lack of new deposits; those weeks went somewhere on 5/30 during the reconfiguration.

Now, I'm not disputing your point---I'm certainly not going to be putting prime weeks into RCI---it just doesn't explain Black Saturday from what I know of the situation.

Correct. Black Sunday was an obvious quantum change in timesharing reality. Do we have to understand what happened on Black Sunday to know why 40% of the top resorts no longer can be seen by some (all? this is what needs to be tested) of us? Perhaps that's the case. But it is impossible to conduct experiments in the past - all we can do is do something today to try to understand our present situation.

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

If I understand JLB's data correctly (not presented here, but in the past), no, it doesn't fit the data.

Pre-5/30 there was availability. Post 5/30 there isn't. That isn't explained by a lack of new deposits; those weeks went somewhere on 5/30 during the reconfiguration.

Now, I'm not disputing your point---I'm certainly not going to be putting prime weeks into RCI---it just doesn't explain Black Saturday from what I know of the situation.

Changes in consumer behavior are slow motion changes, especially in a situation like timeshare deposits. This happened far too suddenly to be accounted for by changing consumer behavior. This was clearly something orchestrated from the top by RCI.

However, I do think that the consumer behavior is following the same trend. It doesn't look like either my family or myself will be able to use our prime summer OBX week next year, so we have just put it up for rent with a local broker. If it isn't rented 2 months out, then I will change it to a spacebank deposit with DAE. Before the rental practices of RCI, it would have gone as an RCI deposit, rather than what I am doing with it.

From attending an orientation meeting at a UK timeshare, something I usually do not do, but on that day with the weather outside I did, I learned that the resort owners who were present at the meeting were onto the vast decline in RCI trading options and nobody gave their good weeks to RCI anymore.