I suspect the timeshare industry as a whole may be facing a demographic bomb at some point. How many timeshare owners do you know who are younger than 40?
I was interested in my 30s but didn't have the $8k or so to buy HGVC resale and reimburse the years MFs and close. The $2k a year wasn't really an issue, just saving that much up vs using it for other things. Had I realized I could have grabbed Wyndham (and felt comfortable doing so) for much less, I probably would have. But very very few people have retail prices in discretionary funds to begin with, and even less in their 20s or 30s I'd wager. Just because the first buy in is in the 40s-50s doesn't mean the industry is going to die out, as long as replacement numbers buy in at that age.
Most of the "problems" of the industry like insane retail prices, lying sales pitches and overall bad reputation seem to maybe limit the overall potential size of the industry, but aren't actually hurting it as a whole. For whatever reason more people pay off the loans and pay the MFs( while bitching rather than using it ) than default that the industry is doing fine. And while the MFs are ~$1,000 or less a year, I think this may continue indefinitely - people hate hard cancellation of recurring charges, and timeshares might be the hardest.
I think the real tipping point is if the MFs get high enough (like many complaining re MVC and 30% increases over the last couple years) that it's not a "this is kind of annoying I'm paying this money down the drain" and tips over into "I need to get rid of this waste cause it's a noticeable percentage of my income". As long as the "happy knowledgeable and getting value out of timeshares" percentage of owners is the population of TUG more or less, then the MFs tipping point is IMO held lower. I.e. Reporting seems to imply that average people will dump ~ $200 or so a month into takeout/coffee because at work, but
they also get a value out of that. I think a surprising number of people will not really track down ~ $90 a month, but as that starts hitting more like $400 a month with MFs getting into the $4,000+ range - people start to ask themselves questions. And this is an issue regardless of if you get retail or resale, but the mortgages make it much easier to hit those monthly fees. Supposedly these MFs are necessary to maintain the resorts.
And this all comes back to the current business model. When your main plan is to basically trick people into paying yearly for something they can't really use (like a really expensive gym membership, but worse cause you usually
could just show up to the gym with like 5 minutes forethought to drive there) - you can't also increase that cost forever. I think you have to either keep the cost low or actually increase the value to the customer. I've said before how I think places could do that, but I don't think independents really have the sales staff which is the issue. I think open RCI / II / whatever resorts do have a value proposition, especially if they moved to a tiny or free buy in on returned weeks, and made it easy to return the week - but they don't have the ability to do that in a lot of cases.
