MIAMI, USA

INTERVAL International, a Miami-based travel leisure service company in the vacation ownership market, is working with Jamaican hoteliers to get preferential rates for its timeshare members.

“What we are doing now is that we are working with several large hotel operators in Jamaica, and we are basically working with them to negotiate a preferred rate exclusively for our members, and we will rent those weeks as ‘getaways’ to our two million members,” explained Neil Kolton, Interval International’s director, Caribbean and Florida resorts sales and service.

He stressed that his company is moving a significant volume of room/nights under that initiative.

“Most of that inventory is at all-inclusive properties, but we are also working with a few non-traditional hotels,” Kolton told the Jamaica Observer during the 15th Annual Shared Ownership Conference at the Eden Roc Miami Beach in Miami, Florida, on Monday.

The properties, he said, include the Coyaba Hotel in Montego Bay, Sunset Beach Resorts in Negril, Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, Jewel Hotel in Ocho Rios and the former Breezes Hotel in Negril.

Timeshare is a model where multiple parties own rights to use a resort condominium unit at different time periods. But there are few timeshare properties in Jamaica.

Kolton explained that his company’s latest initiative became necessary because of the lack of timeshare properties on the island, where many of his members want to vacation.

“….So when our members want to take their timeshare week to visit Jamaica, there is basically a very limited opportunity for them to do that, so the next best thing for us to do for our members to get to Jamaica where they very much want to visit, is to rent inventory at preferential rates for them through getaways,” said Kolton.

Added Kolton: “That, however, is not our preference. Our preference long term is to work with hoteliers in Jamaica and get them to look at timeshare because Jamaica is a very important market for us.”

Meanwhile, Kolton said the Caribbean continues to be the international destination of choice for US leisure travellers in the timeshare subsector.

“If you look at surveys that we conduct with our members year after year, the Caribbean continues to be the number one most desired international travel destination of choice for US resident- members, which is about 1.4 million of our roughly two million members globally,” said Kolton.

According to a recent survey conducted by Interval International, 40 per cent of its US resident-members plan to vacation in the Caribbean during the next two years.

The Caribbean islands of Aruba, St Maarten and Bahamas have the highest concentration of timeshare business in the Caribbean.

Conceptualised in Europe in the 1960s, a timeshare property is typically a resort condominium unit, which is owned by many parties, each of them with rights to use it for a portion of the year.

More than 900 delegates from across Europe, the US and the Caribbean attended the two-day conference which ended yesterday.