ARDA develops a Luxury Forum

[DC4MS]

The American Resort Development Association (ARDA) has created "The Fractional and Private Residence Club Forum" to address the needs of individuals working with fractional, private residence club and destination club products.

The forum leaders’ intention is to identify sub-chairs who offer a scope of expertise, offer engaging topics, encourage collective participation and lay a foundation for future and long term success for the industry’s luxury product segment. The vision of the new forum is to further integrate and link the forum attendees to the luxury product educational sessions offered at the annual convention and to give real value to the these members by providing national resources that otherwise are not currently available.

I have attached a PDF of the Best Practices from the 2007 Luxury Forum meeting.

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[TravelGuy]

I find this development extremely interesting since ARDA has been one of the most vocal opponents of DCs in the past and view them as competition. This may be another attempt by ARDA to have DCs restrained by all the crazy regulations made for timeshares. The DCs are much smaller and have smaller budgets to comply with the bureaucracy that timeshares have created. This move may possibly be a "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" move? Any dollar that a DC spends on over regulation is a dollar less to spend on a new vacation destination for me!

[DC4MS]

I am in favor of consumer protection regulations for Destination Clubs, but not onerous laws that would not serve to protect the members.

The ARDA has published several “opinions” on the Destination Club industry and not all of them are glowing. I read them with a grain of salt as the ARDA mainly represents timeshare and fractional developers and Destination Clubs represent a small, but growing competition for them.

However, ARDA’s worst fears (and mine too) came true with the bankruptcy of Tanner & Haley and this single event has caused major damage to the Destination Club industry and continues to act like fuel to the fire for the ARDA and anyone skeptical about destination clubs. Fortunately, I believe that the current top-ten most popular Destination Clubs have adapted their product well and will avoid the mistakes of T&H in the past.

I think “ARDA’s calls for true transparency, regulatory oversight, and financial assurances” is a genuine call for “regulation and structural protections for consumers” of the Destination Club industry and this is a good thing for all destination clubs.

Here are a few ARDA links to their publications on Destination Clubs:

ARDA | August 15, 2006

ARDA | Last Word September 2006

ARDA | Developments magazine