That's because everything else is a cost center.
The timeshare sales process is not particularly different from most anything else, except in a matter of degree. I can think of dozens and dozens of times when someone selling me something either didn't mention an obvious limitation, embellished what was possible, or allowed me to maintain an inaccurate understanding of a product in its favor. While commerce doesn't
have to be an adversarial process, it nearly always is.
My "business" is no different: Michigan will tell you why getting a degree is critical, and worth every penny of the quarter million dollars you will spend on tuition, and why Michigan is the
best value in the US. I spend a lot of time at student recruiting events telling students that it doesn't matter where they go to school, as long as it feels like a good fit. The Admissions office still invites me to go, but they also nearly panic every time I have the microphone.
I agree - we do it even at the software company I work at. When we're in sales mode - we emphasize what we do well and minimize or avoid talking about our pain points where we don't do well. Unless the customer is intelligent enough to ask about those weak points - we aren't going to volunteer them until after the deal closes. Then, we hold Q&A sessions after product training, along with design review sessions, and
then we speak openly about the pain points and limitations. Oftentimes we are asked why we didn't speak about these pain points prior, well, because we'd be less likely to make the sale, and because these pain points exist with almost all products in the marketplace really (there is no magic bullet). In this respect, I agree it's somewhat adversarial regardless of the industry in scope - though perhaps to a lesser degree when compared to the timeshare industry (used car salesmen come to mind as a close equal though).
That said, at least in my industry vertical (software sales and service), with the move of everything to the cloud/SaaS - most organizations are moving to a success management business model. This is because as the customer base stops buying perpetual software licensing for premise based software installations and instead moves to purchasing SaaS subscriptions for cloud-based solutions - success management principles become much more important and net new software sales becomes less important. This is because once someone signs up for a subscription - the success management teams become responsible for retention, upsell and cross-sell activities - and therefore post-sale relationship management and customer experience become the priority. As the customer base converts over to subscriptions - eventually net new sales becomes a very small part of the overall business model - and success management becomes the primary focus area. Point being - success management principles are designed to ensure ongoing CSAT post-sale over the long term. It's all about building trust over the long term with each customer. It's not about selling the customer something via the pre-sales and sales teams and then throwing the sale over the fence into support/post-sales teams. It's about ensuring the customer is happy throughout the entire pre-sales, sales, and post-sale process persistently. This is not the way Wyndham works today - as is evidenced by how sales behaves. They don't care about the methods used to sell their product - once they have their hooks into you - they simply disappear (as many people can attest to - the salesperson disappears after the initial sale) - and then the post-sale customer service teams are left to pick up the pieces. It is a broken business model in today's world. Companies that realize this and adapt and move toward a success management model will stay around - most companies that don't adapt will die on the vine in comparison - because their competition is building trusted advisory type relationships over the long term - and no sales tactics can beat out a long term trusted relationship model. The newer automotive manufacturers like Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, etc., the pure play BEVS - are using a success management model. The traditional auto manufacturers are for the most part still relying on the old broken traditional dealer based sales model in comparison. We are watching this transition play out across various different industries at present. It is interesting to watch.
Which brings me to another thought that I don't often bring up, but why not.
If we really expect Wyndham to replace the retail timeshare revenue stream with something else - what do we expect that revenue stream to be? My honest answer is Extra Holidays - direct corporate timeshare rentals. Why is Wyndham making the changes we're all witnessing? Because they recognize they need to build new income streams to replace the age old retail timeshare sales revenue stream over time. If that means that Wyndham has to become the primary rental arm - well then we have to decide what we really want as owners. If we want opt-in only timeshare sales, then we need to accept that Wyndham needs to become the renter of their timeshare resorts in order to compensate for the revenue losses tied to the current opt-out timeshare sales model. We cannot have it both ways. There are other options - such as timeshare leases as opposed to perpetual ownerships, which I think is also going to become more prevalent, so the revenue replacements will utilize a multi-pronged approach - but my prognostication is that Wyndham will eventually eliminate the vast majority of owner-based rentals and absorb this revenue directly. Again, Wyndham has a primary fiduciary responsibility to it's shareholders to generate revenue and shareholder profits. Is this a controversial conclusion on my part? Perhaps - but that's what I see happening long term - a question of when not if.
EDIT: One last comment while I'm on a roll. Even the CSAT emails are sales driven. The very opening question in the "Tell us about your stay at..." emails has nothing to do with the actual stay, screenshot below for reference:
What does my likelihood of recommending Wyndham to a friend have to do with my stay at OTA? The answer in my view, is nothing. This is a sales driven inquiry that has little to do with customer satisfaction specific to my stay at OTA, and just another example of how sales driven the entire Wyndham enterprise still is. This is what needs to change.
