DRI functioned well when Cloobeck was in charge because Cloobeck was interested in building a brand and valued customer service because that was part of the goal. Cloobeck stepped back, and the financiers have taken control. And the perspective has totally changed.
I think your statement above really encapsulates the disconnect I feel sometimes when I hear longtime DRI owners talk about their ownership vs newer DRI owners like myself (who became DRI owners by acquisition). I have no personal experience with Cloobeck or how he ran the company. My only experience with DRI is under the recent Palmer model.
And without going into a long explanation, I personally wonder if DRI internally was under some pressure to sell themselves to protect their stock options? I personally question the long term sustainability of the growth and sales model they were touting to Wall St. There were some other murmurings / comments from various places in the last 12 months that while DRI’s sales and revenue growth was impressive on paper, the quality of that growth and sustainability of it was maybe not as strong and stable as it may have looked.
When I review the company history over the last 5 or 6 years I see a company that looks like it was mostly committed to jamming their owners everywhere hard with aggressive annual MF increases that have bordered on usurious while providing owner services that have reduced in quality, are highly inefficient, or flat out broken.
Cloobeck may very well have started with the idea / concept that he wanted to build a quality brand centered around owner loyalty. But at the end, before the Apollo purchase, DRI felt and acted like a company (IMO) whose primary mission was to try and impress Wall St with revenue growth at the expense of their customers and longer term viability. Dealing with them made me feel like the company CEO was actually Gordon Gekko and the company motto was “screw the brand concept, how much can we squeeze these lemmings for to get our PPS up.” Once could argue this ended up working out for senior management since they all walked away incredibly wealthy after the Apollo deal.
I do agree that much remains to be determined on how this Apollo deal will impact owners…for better or worse. But since I believe the DRI sales and growth model was not sustainable, and had maybe become one of the worst models in the timeshare industry (for actual owners), I was not unhappy to see change.
Again, this is all just my opinion obviously.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and your past experience. I can relate based on my own work experiences.