"Timeshare, are they all the same?"

No, there are fixed weeks, anytime in a season weeks, club weeks and more

Legals, timeshare varieties and exchanging location

Nearly all timeshares in Europe are club trustee, a legal right to use, with a trustee company owning the freehold of the entire resort for members protection, with a certificate issued by the trustee giving the entitlement guaranteed for the duration. This can be for an apartment week and unit number, a floating band in a particular resort, a floating band in the clubs resorts, and even a floating period for exchange externally with an exchange company. Other types of ownership are UK leasehold or Spanish Escritura (lease), the latter being best avoided as it is cumbersome and expensive to transfer ownership.

Timeshares can be stand alone or part of a wider range of resorts within a club, such as Viva Timeshare, RCI Points, Compass Club, Hilton, Club La Costa and Sunterra to name but a few. These are called multi destination clubs (and Viva for instance gives you the right to take up to 4 weeks a year in any size of unit and at any time of year, unrestricted and you only pay the equivalent of the management fee when you book your holiday, so if you don’t go, you don’t have a fixed bill for the management.

If you prefer to own (have the right to use) the same time and same place every year these are called fixed weeks and have the advantage of your being able to return there year on year. Another variant is floating time at a specific resort, where a season such as high or peak gets you a return visit subject to a first come first served basis on dates.

These can then be exchanged with the clubs resorts internally, if it is a group such as Compass or through one of the 4 major exchange networks on a week for week basis on a like for like basis in terms of quality and unit size and more importantly time of year or week number. The 4 being RCI, the largest in terms of members, resorts and the quality spectrum, II or Interval International which is the next largest and has a higher minimum criteria level and famous brands such as Marriott resort hotels and Hyatt, then VivaAccess resort exchange and Dial an Exchange the latter having a free membership and no quality / demand control.

RCI Points are where you buy a fluid amount of points, pure points, or you can have weeks utilised as points, where you get a value for the weeks you own every year in exchange for always letting RCI have the right to use them. Pure points work the same as converted to points weeks but have a resale value of nil, so weeks owned and rights retained in the weeks, is the best option here unless you don't care about the instant loss of value.

Whichever method of ownership, once the weeks are banked into any exchange system they in effect become floating time, similar to points, until a booking is made of course. Floating time means you can book anytime in that time band (e.g. high season) and if you own red time then you can generally holiday throughout the year on a first come first served basis

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