Product Description

There are more than 5,400 timeshare resorts in destinations as diverse as England and Africa, Orlando and Shanghai. More than 3 million North Americans own timeshares around the world. Is timeshare ownership for you? Packed with information for current and prospective owners, this guide points out the plusses and the pitfalls and lets you in on the smartest ways to buy, sell, or swap timeshares. It covers:

• Questions to ask yourself
• Questions to ask timeshare sales representatives
• An overview of the types of timeshare ownership
• An update on variations on traditional timeshare vacations
• Financing, maintenance fees, assessments, and other economic considerations

Like every For Dummies travel guide, Timeshare vacations For Dummies includes:

• Down-to-earth trip-planning advice
• What to look for—and what to look out for
• Which options best fit your budget and your vacation style

Handy Post-it Flags to mark your favorite pages

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #541450 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-08
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 236 pages

From the Back Cover
Travel smart at www.dummies.com

Explore timeshare vacations — the fun and easy way®

There are more than 5,400 timeshare resorts around the world and over 3 million timeshare owners in North America. This guide points out the plusses and the pitfalls and lets you in on the smartest ways to buy, sell, or exchange timeshare.

Discover

• The top timeshare destinations around the globe
• Insider tips on buying, selling, and renting timeshare
• How to play the timeshare exchange game
• Handy Post-it® Flags to mark your favorite pages

About the Author
Lisa Ann Schreier is the founder of Timeshare Insights, an independent and unbiased organization dedicated to guiding consumers through the often mysterious and sometimes tedious world of timeshare. Before moving to the Orlando, Florida, area in 1997, she worked in the advertising and media industry in Chicago, becoming a media buyer for major clients. She formed GRQ Enterprises, an advertising and consulting business providing one-stop marketing expertise for clients.
Since moving to central Florida, she has worked for several timeshare resorts in the Orlando area, as a salesperson, a sales manager, and a trainer. Seeing firsthand the good, the bad, and the ugly in the industry, she first became a contributing columnist to The Timeshare Beat, the industry’s most widely read publication, where she blended her advertising expertise with her timeshare experience. In 2003, she formed Timeshare Insights, where her focus has been on educating potential and current timeshare owners, believing that an educated consumer can bring about necessary changes to the industry.
Ms. Schreier has been featured on WOR-AM in New York City, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Hiatus Magazine, and both WLS-TV and WGN-TV in Chicago. She is a frequent guest speaker at timeshare owners’ groups, consumer travel shows, and timeshare management university classes. She is also the author of Surviving a Timeshare Presentation . . . Confessions from the Sales Table (Oct. 2004).
You can contact Lisa at www.timeshareinsights.com, or through her agent, Ibach and Associates, at www.ibachsportspr.com.

Customer Reviews

Advice on what to buy is weak
This book has some good basic information on what timesharing is, and the different types of timeshares available (deeded versus right-to-use; fixed versus floating; etc.)

However, the advice about what to actually buy leaves a lot to be desired. For example, she specifically advises buyers that good deals may be had in developer ("new") timeshares in overbuilt areas, that is, areas with many, many timeshares. In fact, overbuilt areas generally give very low trading power and are therefore a poor value. In particular, the author presents Orlando as the best place to buy a timeshare. In reality, Orlando timeshares are a glut on the market and (unless you own a Christmas or Spring Break week) rarely receive good trades. The author gives an example of how you can't trade into a top Orlando resort with a non-Orlando timeshare that cost only $1,000 resale. Well, I've done it -- repeatedly.

Some of the advice here makes me question how extensive the author's knowledge of timeshares is. For example, she says it is often a good idea to buy a 3-bedroom unit that "locks off" into three 1-bedroom units. However, there are few, if any, timeshares that work this way; "lock-off" units almost always convert into two units, not three, and usually only one of the two units is a one-bedroom, rather than a studio. Also, the author says (p. 23) "Private sleeping capacity is just that: separate sleeping rooms." This is misleading; private sleeping capacity is based on each couple sleeping privately, not each individual. So, if a timeshare unit sleeps six separately, that means it has three private sleeping areas that each hold two people, not six private sleeping areas.

The internet has an active timesharing community, full of people who respond very strongly when they feel that a timeshare salesperson -- which this author is, or at least used to be -- is giving out misleading information. That is why this book is getting criticism here. The criticism is coming from the online timeshare users' community, not from timeshare salespeople.

My advice? This book is OK if you just want some info about timesharing, but before you plunk down serious money to actually buy a timeshare, [...]

Stay away!!
For anyone who is looking for more info about timeshares, this book is the last place that you should look. Like others have pointed out, it is biased towards buying from the developer and mentions Orlando timeshares as being good buys, when Orlando is probably the most overbuilt area in the world. If there is anyone who really wants to learn about timeshares, spend some time researching online at good sites like tug2.net

Pretty good primer for beginners
I found the book fairly informative and basic for those of us completely new to timeshare. I have to think some of the reviewers here never read this book, because the author indeed goes out of her way to reference informative webpages (including tug2.net mentioned here and others) for further information.

Did a good job of breaking down the "lingo" that I had a hard time slogging through online. A good place to start, but not the be-all and end-all if you really need to learn about time shares, but I don't think it was meant to be. But this book is certainly a good jumping-off place.