Holland America Line Privileges

[sail7seas]

Well, that does shed a diferent light on the facts and figures.

[twodjs]

Well, I have a different perspective, because for the cost to join, they offered a total of three weeks at a particular timeshare that we have stayed at and know the normal price for. It was a deal for us. Don't understand others buying things they don't need or want. When we travel, we always stay in hotels, pre or post cruise. We check with Privilages for the price of our usual hotel selection, and their price usually beats even Hotels.com. Plus every stay gets us additional credit to be used on future HAL cruises. Certainly not for everyone if you don't travel much, but works for us!

[iancal]

This may well be different.

 

I read an in depth article on the business of timeshares. Marketing costs for a timeshare project amount to 25-33 percent of the cost to the customer according to the article. Most common is 30-33 percent range. This percentage surprised me.

 

Salespeople are well paid but 100 percent commission. Just one reason why re-sales are so much less expensive. Both times when we said no to the time share they tried to flog some vacation club membership to us.

Edited August 24, 2018 by iancal

[Jade13]

Well at least I was able to get my money back.

 

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If I understand correctly, you paid $2,500 and stayed at two different resorts for a week. So basically you paid $1,250 per week for each resort stay (also drinks were a separate charge as well as other fees). Your work reimbursed you for your flights.

 

 

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[penguinscott]

One thing one can always count on when cruising is having to wait in a few lines.

[twodjs]

People are misunderstanding - Privileges is not a timeshare presentation. The timeshare weeks (two weeks plus one we won in a drawing) we received as gifts for joining. They did not try to sell us a timeshare during their presentation. The gifts spoke to us because we had stayed at that specific timeshare before (won it as high bidder in a fundraising auction) and the cost to join Privileges was less than our auction bid. The cost to join then was a wash, since we had already planned to go there again. What we are left with is a travel club where hotels we choose to stay provide some credits for each night we stay toward future HAL cruises. They have other high-end items in the program, but only the hotel booking interests us. We are using two of our free weeks in Cabo in a month. The other is on Vancouver Island in Oct. The program worked for us.