Holiday Releases Mega Marketing Timeshare Report

Holiday Equity announced the release of preliminary results of their privately funded timeshare marketing study.

David Skinner, Holiday's President, stated, "Unlike studies by industry groups that focus on buyers and the reasons they love timeshare, Holiday chose to turn the tables and focus on non-buyers and their opposing views.

Skinner stated the primary question Holiday addressed in the research was: "With 110 Million adult households in the US, and after nearly 30 years of active timeshare sales, why are there only a mere 4 percent that own timeshare?"

The comprehensive Holiday study followed four integrated tracks. The first classified a database of 14,000 buyers and non-buyers by demographics using the PRIZM system developed by Claritas. PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets) attributes 66 cluster codes of socioeconomic characteristics to each data entry.

"It is so detailed," Skinner said, "it will show your family grouping, the car you drive, and the magazines you read."

This was followed by two online surveys of owners and non-owners, their vacation preferences, timeshare awareness and product opinions.

The final phase, a battery of live and online focus groups, probed the social and behavioral interactions between timeshare owners and non-owners when presented with different sets of vacation alternatives.

"The consumers in our focus groups were incredibly candid," Skinner notes. "They shared several levels of reasons why they love and hate timeshare, and they gave us some valuable insights on how we might want to position the product to best appeal to a broader segment of the market."

After six months the Holiday study is nearing completion, and already striking differences with commonly held industry beliefs are evident.

As David Skinner said, "While the recent American Resort Developers Association report concurred with our averages, we wanted to look deeper than just averages. For example, we were able to identify details that indicate many timeshare owners are among the wealthiest consumers in the country, and two of the Prism clusters dominated the owner mix by 300 percent compared to general population distributions. These are significant findings!"

"Our challenge now," Skinner said, "is to fully digest what we have learned and develop an action plan that draws on the new insights provided by the four tracks in this research. We are optimistic that we and our affiliates will find this to be one of the most valuable tools in our strategic arsenal, and will prove to be a true competitive advantage in the timeshare marketplace."