Exchange promises
We hear plenty of complaints from timeshare owners about poor exchange availability. So what’s really going on?
Most people don’t buy a week at their home resort as a stand-alone holiday solution. Even if the resort is stunning, owners typically expect they’ll want different destinations for future breaks.
“No problem,” says the shiny, ultra-friendly timeshare salesperson. “You can exchange to over 4,300 equally high-quality resorts all over the world. 4,300 choices should be enough for you, right?”
Prospects are then taken on a spellbinding, imaginary tour of spectacular resorts in exotic locations, via a glossy brochure or slick website. The logic sounds simple: “Owners at those 4,300 resorts don’t want to holiday at their own resort every year either. So they deposit their week and take a week that someone else deposited.”
Sold. It doesn’t feel like you’re buying membership of one resort. It feels like you’re buying access to five-star holidays in nearly 100 countries.
In reality, those grand plans often fail to materialise. But why?
Why exchange availability is so limited
Yes, there are more than 4,300 resorts in the biggest timeshare exchange network, RCI" href="https://ecc-eu.com/tag/rci">RCI. And yes, in theory you can request an exchange into any of them. But in practice, timeshare exchange availability rarely matches the sales pitch.
The 4,300 resorts vary hugely in quality, and their locations are not equally desirable. Availability also changes dramatically by season: school holidays, peak summer weeks and ski season are in far higher demand than off-peak dates.
Put simply: everybody wants the best resorts at the best times, and there just isn’t enough space to go around.
A Timeshare Advice Centre survey found that less than 1% of timeshare owners get the exchanges they want. Here’s what that looks like in real-world availability.
Regular holiday accommodation availability
At the time of going to press (November 2025), we searched Booking.com for holiday accommodation on the Costa del Sol during a school summer holiday week: 25 July to 1 August (eight months from the date of the search).
We used a full week because many timeshare resorts only allow bookings in one-week blocks. Booking.com and similar sites don’t typically have that restriction.
As the screenshot shows, there were 13,655 available one-bedroom units on the Costa del Sol for that week. Naturally, the number reduces if you filter for the very best properties (for example, “exceptional” review scores of 9.5+ out of 10). Even then, the results showed 5,236 units—still a huge amount of choice.
Timeshare exchange availability will always be lower than the wider holiday market. But is there still enough choice to deliver what owners were promised?
Timeshare exchange availability (RCI)
No—there simply isn’t.
Minutes later, the same dates searched via the RCI exchange website for Spain returned just two available units.
That’s not a misprint: only two exchange options were available across the whole of Spain (while the Booking.com search was limited to the Costa del Sol).
Of those two, only one was on the Costa del Sol. The other was out of season. When you factor in rising maintenance fees—often increasing to more per year than the cost of regular holidays—it’s easy to see why owners feel angry when the holidays they’re paying for are hard to book.
“Perhaps the biggest factor affecting timeshare exchange availability is the reality that almost no timeshare resorts are exclusive to their members any more.
“Since new member timeshare sales has all but ceased in Europe, many resorts made a paradigm-altering decision to rent a portion of their inventory to the general public. They would argue it was necessary to keep their businesses afloat. But imagine paying £20,000 or more for membership of an ‘exclusive’ resort, only to find that resort is available to people who never paid to join. Often those non-members can stay at a lower cost than members pay in maintenance fees.
“If those members had simply waited a few years, they could have stayed in the same resorts without paying a joining fee—and often for less per visit than they’re paying now.
“Non-members taking up inventory that used to be reserved for members is a major reason why timeshare exchanges are so hard to secure today.”
Does this match your experience?
If you’re a timeshare owner who feels they were mis-sold, or the product isn’t performing as promised for any reason, get in touch today for confidential, expert advice.
