The cover story of the Fall 2023 issue of Developments highlights how SLRG is helping the American Resort Development Association gain critical insights on the mindset and resultant behaviors of vacation travelers and its opportunities for the timeshare industry through regular pulsing of consumer sentiment.
The reports and other research produced by the ARDA International Foundation (AIF) do more than simply publish an array of facts and figures that resort developers and timeshare owners find interesting and perhaps personally useful.
AIF’s statistics have a broader purpose that involves telling the industry’s story in a way that communicates its successes and advocates for its place in the travel pantheon, in ways that the media, investors, and the general public can more fully appreciate.
For example, the 2023: State of the Vacation Timeshare Industry report painted a clear, backto-pre-pandemic-normal picture for timeshare, with total sales volume up 30% to $10.5 billion in 2022; average occupancy of 77.6%, up 4% from 2021; 11.6 million nights rented, up 6.4%; and rental revenue of $2.7 billion, up 21%. There are now a grand total of 1,541 timeshare resorts with an aggregate 201,600 units.
To Lan Wang, director of research at AIF, the most important research finding from the State of the Industry report has been that the timeshare industry has fully recovered in terms of total sales volume. The fact that rental revenue has exceeded pre-pandemic levels is another key point, she believes.
Published every other year is the Economic Impact Study, which helps state and federal affairs teams to promote and defend the industry, and to ensure that favorable legislation is approved, Wang said. That’s done both nationally and at the state and local levels in strategic spots such as central Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, and Colorado.
The accompanying interactive dashboard, known as the 2023 State of the Vacation Timeshare Industry and Economic Impact Report Tool, provides a data visualization tool to help readers better understand the study’s results, while allowing those in the industry to benchmark their own data vis-à-vis the rest of the timeshare sector.
Sarah Conroy, senior director, marketing & communications, cites topline statistics from the Economic Impact Study such as the 400,000 jobs in the industry, timeshare’s overall economic output of $73 billion, and $10.7 billion in taxes paid annually by timeshare companies.
The Economic Impact Study also has revealed that, for example, the resort industry prompts another $4.6 billion in off-site spending at area attractions, restaurants, and shops, Conroy said. “We’re not just providing jobs at a specific resort; there’s a lot of offsite spending that we as an industry are responsible for,” she said. “As we’re looking at our importance to communities, the economic impact reports give us an idea.”
Year-over-year data show macroeconomic impacts that emerge even as the numbers show some volatility and sensitivity, said Christopher Agnew, senior vice president, planning and analysis, for Travel + Leisure.
“Our industry is very resilient in tougher economic times,” he said. “The data is starting to show that.”
AIF pushes out other economic reports, as well. In July, the foundation published an annual Financial Performance Study, which takes a deeper, more specialized dive into financial metrics, Wang said. That work and the State of the Industry report “support each other,” she said.
Another piece, the Consumer Optimism Barometer — previously known (during COVID) as the Back to Normal Barometer — makes comparisons between the behavior of timeshare owners and travelers in general. A broader set of ideas that incorporates general thoughts about everything from work-from-home, to who’s back at work, to the economy in general, this study “consistently shows that timeshare owners are more confident and travel more,” Wang said.
Agnew does not see this “back to normal” trend as a story anymore. “We went way above normal,” he said. “We had huge strength last year. There was clearly some pent-up demand, some ‘revenge travel.’ Even underlying that, peeling back a little more, the increase in the level [of travel] is a long-term trend. Different demographics prioritize very differently. And then workfrom-anywhere is something that we see in the hard data, where length of stay has increased. … Travel on Thursday, work on Friday, and you’re at your destination on Friday afternoon. That’s real, and that’s likely permanent.”
Owner Sentiment
To capture owners’ mindsets, AIF has been piloting the monthly Timeshare Owner Sentiment Index for the past several months, conducted in partnership with Sports & Leisure Research Group. “We are pursuing similar trends as the optimism barometer study,” Wang said. “The theme is still comparing timeshare owners with travelers in general.”
The June 2023 edition of the pilot study provided an array of insights and opinions, focused on the consistent finding that timeshare owners’ attitudes and behaviors toward travel are considerably more bullish than those of Americans overall. They plan to travel more actively, enjoy their vacations more, and expect more from service quality when traveling, according to the research.
To be more specific, about half said they were planning a vacation before August, with Millennials especially likely to be thinking positively about travel, while those who said they were looking to either upgrade their current timeshare or purchase additional timeshare product significantly outpaced those in the market to sell their timeshare.
During even-numbered years, ARDA conducts a more comprehensive Owner Study that helps answer media questions about the demographic profile of owners, Wang said. “The numbers of owners, who they are, what they purchase, how they use their timeshare, those kinds of things,” she said.
Sports & Leisure Research Group, based in White Plains, New York, has been working directly with AIF to produce a variety of research on travelers, and timeshare owners specifically, said Jon Last, president. “One of the things we’ve been helping them to be on top of, particularly with the economy in flux, we’ve been able to get a good barometer … of how that [uncertainty] may impact the spending seasonally around various holidays, to help them understand and position the timeshare market relative to the broader state of travelers overall.”
Last agreed about the key takeaway from the Owner Sentiment Index: “Your timeshare owner is much more bullish,” he said. “They’re much more apt to be taking vacations, to be spending money, to be looking at taking multiple vacations during the course of the year.”
To determine what drives that sentiment, the research delves into their most recent experience and asks how satisfied they were, how likely they would be to recommend a timeshare, and whether they’re looking to increase their commitment — whether that involves the purchase of additional units or trading up into other opportunities, Last said.
“With our industry, there’s seven or eight businesses under one umbrella. Usually, somebody comes in, gets caught in their silo,
and all these other areas, they’re not exposed to. ARDA 100 helps them get familiar.” — Darla Everitt, vice president, product development and innovation, Marriott Vacations Worldwide, and chair, ARDA research committee
“The timeshare traveler is 85% more likely to have taken a vacation away from home in the past month,” he said. “They are 40% to 50% more likely to spend significantly more time and money on vacation, over six-month intervals looking back and forward. That demonstrates a commitment to the vacation product relative to the overall travel market.”
ARDA and Sports & Leisure will be rolling out the Owner Sentiment Index to the public this fall, Last added. “The goal is to better inform [stakeholders] with regular monthly sentiments and behaviors relative to the broader travel market,” he said. “Ideally, we’ll be developing a dynamic dashboard or scorecard to give people a sense of the industry at any one time.”
The tendency of the timeshare customer in particular, and affluent travelers in general, to defy macroeconomic travel trends is partly due to a phenomenon that Sports & Leisure refers to as the “great reprioritization,” underscored by statistics showing that as of late June, less than half of people who work in offices were back full time, Last said.
“Americans have always talked about having a depravity of time,” he said. “The pandemic helped foundationally change that and gave us more flexibility. That has huge implications to the ability to combine work with vacation, and the use of a timeshare unit. That hasn’t gone away.”
Converting Numbers Into Messages
Such facts and figures are front and center when Conroy and her team put together editorial calendars with monthly communication themes and PR pitches. Research from the State of the Industry and Economic Impact reports, for example, are essential to ARDA in a variety of ways in support of communications and advocacy efforts at the local, state, and federal levels,
she said.
“Those are some of the stats that help us tell our story as an industry, and the positive impact that it’s having at all levels,” Conroy said. For example, when ARDA CEO Jason Gamel spoke recently with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, he leaned heavily into those Economic Impact report numbers, Conroy said. “It gives us a new opportunity to reach out to the media with each report we release. Though our work with Finn Partners, our PR agency of record, we draft a narrative around each report that helps further the industry story.” she said.
“The main purposes [of AIF reports] are to educate legislators, to educate the public, and to provide benchmarks for the industry,” Wang adds. “This is a source for [media] when they try to write stories and want support from research, so they’re not just subjective statements saying timeshare owners are satisfied. We provide them with solid numbers, from a study sponsored by AIF but conducted by a third party. … That helps us form and adapt our research, as well.”
Darla Everitt, chair of ARDA’s research committee for the past eight years and vice president, product development & innovation at Marriott Vacations Worldwide, said it’s vitally important to get the data that comes out of AIF’s studies into the right hands, for the right purposes. “Whether it’s used for PR, for educational purposes, for investor relations purposes, there’s so many different uses for the data,” she said. “My job is looking at it from a strategic perspective.”
During the Timeshare Together annual conference in April, for example, AIF research was interspersed into a plethora of sessions, Everitt said. “The communications team at ARDA has brought all of that to life through the educational sessions and through the press releases they’re issuing,” she said.
For example, during one panel discussion, Sports & Leisure drew from the Consumer Optimism Barometer, Last said. “Who’s thinking about making major purchases? Who thinks we’re in a recession?” he said. “What we’re trying to do is twofold: we’re keeping everybody up to speed on the mindset of the consumer, and how that will apply to vacation plans, and specifically timeshare utilization. And we’re also creating a means for how timeshare companies can contrast their owners compared to other active travelers.”
The research output also has helped to inform content for the diversity- and inclusion-focused ARDA 100 Club, Everitt said. “With our industry, there’s seven or eight businesses under one umbrella,” she said. “Usually, somebody comes in, gets caught in their silo, and all these other areas, they’re not exposed to. ARDA 100 helps them get familiar. The research data help somebody understand the bigger picture of the timeshare business,” ranging from resort development, to banking, to marketing and sales, to customer service. “It goes full circle when you look at the resort lifecycle. So much of the research we do touches every aspect of that.”
Messages for Investors
From a communications and advocacy standpoint, Last said such research can, first of all, show accurate pulsing of what to expect in the near term. “It serves as a means to engage with how robust the business may be, as well as a way to show, from a PR standpoint, the power of timeshare, in terms of the ability to generate revenue and usage,” he said. “The timeshare customer or
guest is somebody who is quite attractive from an overall behavior standpoint, when it comes to discretionary spending and leisure as a whole.”
That message can be powerful to investors, Last said. “Investor relations sides of the companies will hopefully be leveraging this information to influence and tell their story to Wall Street,” he said. “We’re looking to have individual properties and holding companies be able to assess their guests and contrast them to the overall vacation market. … [The research] also can be used in a proprietary way for our members to see how effective their marketing programs are performing.”
When Agnew formerly worked on Wall Street as a sell-side research analyst for brokerage firms including Goldman Sachs, he specialized in covering “orphan” stocks — including timeshare and other markets such as car rental and office furniture — that “didn’t fall into these big buckets, and thus would be under-covered by both sell-side and buy-side research analysts,” he said. “If fewer people cover your stock, fewer people are a mouthpiece to investors. It also takes a lot more time and effort” to effectively tell your story.
The kind of numbers AIF provides reduces that effort significantly, Agnew said. “One common element [of orphan stocks] tends to be a lack of data points. Investors like data points,” he said. “Because it helps give them confidence around modeling those businesses, and modeling helps give them confidence to invest in stocks. … Therefore, the idea that we’ve had at ARDA,
in pulling together data points on the industry, is that it will help with investors, and help sell-side analysts, model and think about the industry.”
Monthly data points can help draw attention to the timeshare space in between the publication of quarterly results, Agnew said. “Analysts are writing notes, and people are talking about your industry,” he said. “It can be a hook for media, as well. Why, today, do I talk about your story? Well, we just sent this data point out. The frequency of data points, the timeliness of data points, is really important. To come out monthly, in a timely manner, people will have more information and feel more empowered.” Whether it’s aimed at media relations, investor relations, or a combination, such data bolsters the industry’s positive qualities, Agnew said. “The more eyes looking at the industry, the better,” he said. “We’re just drawing attention to ourselves.”
To ensure that research continues to assist communications and advocacy over time, there’s a continuous feedback loop churning among ARDA’s staff, Wang said. “There’s a healthy cycle of communication between us and the communication team to try to shape our research in a way that helps the industry,” she said. “Research is used to complete stories they’ve been promoting. With inflation analysis, for example, we try to find our historical numbers and compare to outside hotel inflation rates — to try to come up with the story.”
AIF this year, for the first time, has put all its research online for free, which helps disseminate it to reporters and the investor relations community, Conroy said. The association also has made an effort to infuse AIF statistics into its #ARDA360 social media campaign.
“We’re trying to have a very steady drumbeat of positive industry coverage on ARDA social channels,” she said. “We’ve been able to ramp up our efforts, and we’re posting one or two times a day — including member content, things that are going on, new resort openings, philanthropic efforts, etc. Some of our posts with the highest engagement are the ones that have AIF
stats. We’re speaking not only to the ARDA member community but anyone following our social channels.”