Fighting Hotel Competition, Hotel Condo Sales and Indoor Water Parks

The Hotel Industry has more competition to worry about outside of the hotel networks. This competition is not from one hotel chain to another or from one hotel to another. It is competition from the vacation week industry. This also includes the Time Share ownership industry.

An article about the hotel industry in Florida a couple of months ago talked about the rebounding that Florida tourism has had recently. The tourism has been down because to the 9/11 incidents and has recently shown recovery. In the article, it talked about the volume of tourism to Florida destinations being up but the hotel vacancies rates were still up. The question was why? The answer is that there is a new industry in town challenging the hotel business. This industry is the Vacation Week Time Share owners.

One of the Big organization in the Time Share industry is RCI (Resort Condominiums International). They have been around since 1974 and have over 3700 Resorts in their network in more than 100 countries. They are a service organization that assists owners in saving, transferring and using their Time Share vacation weeks. The real prize behind the concept is that the individual owner actually owns real estate in the form of a condominium for the period of one or more weeks. The resort will take the condominium and sell "weeks" of use. This is generally 50 units or weeks that are sold reserving 2 weeks for maintenance. You can read more about the Time Share industry by going to RCI's website: http://www.rci.com/RCIW/

How has this affected the Hotel industry? In areas that are destinations for vacations, the resort industry has begun building more resorts and selling Time Share vacation weeks. As this industry has become more successful, it is dipping into the profits of the hotel industry by lowering the occupancy rates.