A few Worldmark Timeshare owners have called to ask what I felt about the future of Worldmark. They have been concerned with new corporate owners, changing bylaws, and more.
Here are a few thoughts and answers that I can offer. The first one has to do with Owner Advocacy. Have you been to WMowners.com? This is an uncensored website with 300,000 posts with 15,000 to 20,000 subscribers behind it. The folks who started the site, and others, have been very serious about protecting the future of Worldmark. I do not believe any other Timeshare group or Club has anything in place that would come close in comparison. This is a big, big plus for the future of Worldmark.
Second, the maintenance fees at Worldmark are still today one of the lowest in the industry making the owners travel investment pencil out in the black, year after year. Other timeshare companies have high enough maintenance fees that they have lost their vacation value, except for those who have the best weeks at the resort.
In a nutshell, here is the big problem with runaway maintenance fees. If you own a fixed week, but no longer want to return to the same resort and perhaps to the same room, then you need to use an exchange company to try to trade your week for another one someplace else. If your dues, when combined with the yearly membership fee of the exchange company and the exchange fee, equal the price of renting in the open market, then why own your Timeshare? These are the timeshares that are stacking up on eBay and other sites, that owners are so desperate to sell. These timeshares have NO value. The timeshare owners are also the ones that continue to fall prey to the scam artist who tell them their timeshare actually has value, so they get excited and hand them $1,000 or more in anticipation of getting rid of their worthless week. I have people who have paid 2 or 3 companies, because they believed their week had value.
So, how does this relate to the future of Worldmark? When the dues head towards being unbalanced and erode the actual vacation value, it will be time to seriously consider selling. Hopefully, that’s not going to happen!