Hurricanes Can Afflict Timeshare Owners
By Julie Bennett from The Wall Street Journal
Hurricane Charley blew the roofs off 110 apartments of the South Seas Plantation Resort on Captiva Island, Fla, ruining drywall, appliances, furniture—and many vacation plans.
That devastated neighborhood is a time-share community, one of the 1,590 resorts in the U.S. in which people purchase vacation units by the week. Florida has 366 time-share resorts with 27,700 units and about one million owners, according to Scott Berman, partner with the hospitality-and-leisure consulting group of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Miami. Sorting out the damage after a hurricane is difficult enough for individual homeowners, but, for the time-share industry, complications can multiply as fast as the pile of soggy mattresses in the South Seas parking lot.