More and more timeshare owners in the UK are voicing frustration at seeing supposedly ‘exclusive’ resorts available to anyone on major travel platforms such as Booking.com and Expedia.
Outdated accommodation fears
To many modern holidaymakers, timeshare can feel old-fashioned, but it emerged in the 1980s to address a genuine issue. Many people will remember the media stories about ‘holidays from hell’ — trips where the hotel looked impressive in a brochure, but the reality on arrival was a major let-down.
Families would turn up to find building works, tired apartments or accommodation that was far below what they had been promised by the travel agent’s brochure.
Often, people simply tried to make the best of it, telling themselves it was “only somewhere to sleep” and that they’d be out at the beach anyway on their holidays to the Canary Islands or the Spanish Costas.
Those bad experiences, however, made holidaymakers ideal targets for expensive timeshare sales.
The promise of a better stay
By the end of the 1990s, touts were common in many of Europe’s top holiday destinations, using high-pressure tactics to persuade people to sign timeshare contracts.
The pitch was simple: pay to join and you’d get reliable, high-quality accommodation at a premium resort — and when you travelled elsewhere, you could expect the same standards.
The costs were substantial. Many people paid thousands of pounds up front, plus an annual fee that could be higher than the cost of a typical holiday. For many, though, the peace of mind felt worth it.
For a number of years, timeshare memberships did provide that reassurance, helping owners avoid the risk of arriving to poor accommodation they were stuck with for the week.
But in the early years of the new century, the travel industry began to improve, and timeshare resorts started to lose their edge.
Why timeshare started to lose its appeal
One major shift was the rapid growth of user-generated review sites such as TripAdvisor. Travellers could check honest feedback before booking and see what previous guests really thought.
Because these reviews weren’t designed as marketing, they helped people avoid unpleasant surprises and make informed choices.
With greater transparency, there was less reason to pay thousands to join a timeshare scheme — especially with an expensive annual maintenance bill on top.
At the same time, many resorts faced a commercial dilemma: unsold inventory produced no income. Renting out those unused weeks became an obvious way to generate revenue, even if owners didn’t like seeing the general public using what had been sold as “members-only” accommodation.
By 2022, it had become common to see a timeshare resort available on Booking.com, and many owners began asking: can you book timeshare resorts online without membership? In many cases, the answer appeared to be yes — through public booking platforms.
The tipping point for owners
"This was the last straw for most owners," says Andrew Cooper, CEO of European Consumer Claims (ECC). "We get calls from timeshare members whose resort is telling them there is no availability, when they can see the same week available on Booking.com. Often it costs less for a non-member to book online than the member pays in maintenance.
"There is no remaining justification for a timeshare owner to have paid tens of thousands of pounds for a membership when they have no benefits that are not available to the casual renter. This isn't what people paid all that money for. Their resorts are effectively changing the deal without offering any compensation in return.
"Booking through the online sites as a non-member is clearly preferable, because they can come and go as they please. They are not contractually obliged to pay every year for something they may not want to use, unlike the timeshare owners."
"Luckily, since 2016 ECC, together with their associated firm of timeshare lawyers M1 Legal, have been helping people to escape these dated and constrictive membership contracts."
People who bought their timeshare after 1999 may have another route to ending their contract: "Spain enacted laws to protect consumers from high-pressure timeshare sales in January of that year," says Cooper. "Arrogantly, the large majority of resorts ignored those laws, and as a result all the contracts they wrote after that were illegal. Right now, courts are awarding significant amounts of compensation to owners who were mis-sold with those illegal contracts."
With more and more people booking timeshare resorts on Booking.com and even seeing timeshare resorts on Expedia booking results, owners frequently ask whether a Booking.com timeshare week cheaper than maintenance fee is now the norm, and whether is it better to rent timeshare resort than own. Others report situations where there is timeshare no availability but online booking available, raising further questions about how owners are treated when their timeshare owners resort listed on Booking.com.
If you want to book a timeshare holiday without membership, or you would like to find out more about getting out of a timeshare contract and whether you may be due compensation, contact Timeshare Advice Centre today for a free consultation.
