Timeshare Vacation Rentals

[Alex Chin]

Hello BP,

My parents recently inherited a timeshare that carries with it some formidable annual maintenance fees. They would like to keep the timeshare as they are reaching a point where they want to take more frequent vacations and it would help cover the cost of those trips. The company has a points-based system, where members receive a certain amount annually, and they can then bank those points for up to a year and use them to reserve time at various resorts around the world.

I have been dragooned into assisting them with defraying timeshare costs by trying to figure out how to rent out the unused points so that they don't go to waste, before I dive into this myself, I wanted to find out if anyone else has experience with vacation rentals with this set-up. I expect that I'll be reserving time in various resorts and farming those weeks out to perspective vacationers, does anyone know if VRBO, or AirBnB, or some other site would be most appropriate for this approach?

Let me know if there is any more information I can provide, I have had this kinda dumped on me and am scrambling to understand what this process is and how I can help my parents out.

[Lisa Lanata]

I have a couple timeshares i bought at a tremendous discount. I have been to neither one either and have owned them for over 20 years.  I strictly use them to trade into places I really want to go and I can never, ever beat the price I pay for a week as compared to normal rentals rates which are three to seven times higher per night.  So I love it.  If you bank your timeshare (I use RCI) or there is  Interval International, two of the largest ones)  then you can reserve a timeshare at a more popular, in demand location.  You have to learn their websites and know how much value your unit trades for and what you can get and when to look at what's available.  You can do a requested search and pay the exchange fee, normally $219, and it will search an area for a precise time period and it will alert you when they find one and you can accept that resort or not.  I know to search every night at midnight, because a lot of resorts get released in their system then.

So total cost for a week is your maintenance deposit on your resort, then your membership into the trading company like RCI or II which is about $70 per year, the $219 exchange trade fee, and then if you have a guest stay at the resort you book and not yourself as the owner of the traded week, there is an additional $69 fee for the guest certificate to use the week as if they were you.  So make sure you take all those costs into consideration.  

It is way cheaper to rent them out if you are renting out a week at your home resort.  Not sure what fees go along with that if you put a guest in there as I have never rented my place out.

I have one trade week for week resort only and I have a points unit.  And sometimes with my points unit, I can get 1 - 5 weeks out of that one week to go to or in this case for you to rent out.  Depends on the points value of your timeshare unit.   So if you can get more than one week with your points, then that cuts the membership fee down and your maintenance fee down by however many weeks or nights you can get.   I know this sounds so, so, so confusing, but once you learn the timeshare system, it can really work, but you have lots to learn.  Jump in and try it once and see what happens