Timeshare Exchange, The Facts

What Does RCI Offer?

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Over the last 40 years, Timeshare has grown like no other holiday product. From the first few resorts in Europe the system has expanded into a massive global network that has attracted most of the major players in the travel and leisure industry.

 

Timeshare - the early days

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Stories vary about who invented Timeshare and where it first started. Most say that it was conceived by a developer in the south of France who was trying in vain to sell his complex of high-end villas. Rather than waiting for the odd buyer who was able to afford to buy an expensive property outright he instead divided the time in the property into 12 monthly chunks and sold out in no time at all.

And that's the reason that Timeshare is so successful. People buy the amount of time they want to use every year for a fraction of the cost of a holiday home. They don't have to worry about finding renters for the time they are not there, nor do they need to worry about security or maintenance. They simply use their time at the development and enjoy a carefree holiday.

This holiday concept really took off and by the 1970's hundreds of thousands of families owned a piece of their holiday time in resorts across Europe and the United States. But there was something missing. Although the resorts were generally of a very high standard, many owners were expressing dissatisfaction about returning to the same venue year after year. They loved their ownership but felt they were missing out by not visiting other countries and locations.

 

RCI arrives on the scene

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So, in 1974 and in response to the Timeshare world's then lack of flexibility, Jon and Crystal DeHaan started the industry's first exchange company - Resort Condominiums International (RCI). The idea being that if a resort was of the approved standard it could become affiliated to RCI. For Timeshare owners this system meant they could now exchange their week in a French villa for a ski lodge in Switzerland or a log cabin in Canada.

This flexibility obviously made the Timeshare product highly desirable. RCI's stringent selection process meant that a family was assured the very highest quality when they arrived at the exchange resort of their choice. If a resort wasn't up to standard, then it didn't get into the RCI system.

Resort developers soon cottoned on that RCI was a very good thing, and that without it their resort would be far a harder product to sell. To this end developers began to build and maintain the kind of top-class resorts that are synonymous with Timeshare today.

These high standards helped propel the fledgling Timeshare industry into the mainstream holiday market. But it was the added bonus of being able to exchange time in a home resort for somewhere else with the same high standards that really sold the product. So how did it work?

 

How RCI exchanges work

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The basic RCI exchange system works like this:

RCI Spacebank

You simply deposit your week(s) into the RCI Spacebank and withdraw a week(s) at your choice of destination. RCI then charge you a small fee for organising the exchange. That is how they make their money, they don't own, buy or sell any resorts.

 

RCI grading categories

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RCI expanded rapidly in the decade or so after its birth and the company introduced a grading system to make exchanges fairer. In other words RCI wanted a system where people would get "like for like". They divided weeks into the following categories:

Season:

With this categorisation in place, Blue week owners were able to exchange into other resorts during that resort's Blue Time. White week owners could exchange into White and Blue time whilst Red week owners could exchange at any time.

This system made sure that people were getting the fairest exchanges for the time of year that they owned. But this system still allowed people with units in the older resorts with minimum facilities to access the newer, super- luxurious resorts that were springing up around the world. To make this situation fairer RCI introduced the resort grading system that categorised resorts in the following way:

Resort Quality

These distinctions aimed to ensure the fairest exchanges, meaning that owners of a two-bedroom unit at a Gold Crown resort in Red Time would enjoy more "trading power" than an owner of a studio at a Standard resort in Blue Time.

Categorising resort quality certainly made the system fairer, but it wasn't as rigid as some owners would have liked and many complained that the quality of their ownership did not always ensure a fair exchange. Very often the grading system was bypassed to facilitate exchanges for RCI members making the system somewhat redundant.

 

Making exchanges fair - the points system

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So what could RCI do to overcome this lack of fairness? Well, in the 1990s they introduced a brand new system to the exchange marketplace called RCI Points. The idea being that instead of members depositing their week in the Spacebank and hoping for an equivalent exchange, they would now be allocated a set number of points per year to correspond with the quality of their ownership.

For example if you owned a two-bedroom unit in Red Time at a Gold Grown resort you could expect a value of around 70-90,000 points. If, however, you owned a studio at a Standard resort in Blue Time you could expect a value as low as 10,000 points.

This new system meant that RCI members with higher-end ownership could now really make their Timeshare work for them. If, for example, they wanted four week's holiday in any given year they simply chose accommodations with points values that added up to their own value. There was also a financial advantage - if they made their holiday requests in one go they were only charged one fee and not for each week exchanged as was the case with the original system.

This fairness also incorporated a massive degree of flexibility - owners with enough points could go where they wanted, when they wanted, without sacrificing standards. If there was only a studio available then they would only use that amount of points. And points left over could be saved for next year, or put towards car hire, holiday insurance, city breaks, weekends away and until recently flights.

Nowadays, RCI has over 3.6 million members enjoying the benefits of over 5,000 affiliated resorts in more than 100 countries around the world. It still operates both systems but as the years go by, owners are increasingly moving over from fixed weeks to points and are enjoying RCI's key benefits of simplicity, flexibility, value, choice.