A time share holiday in Tenerife

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My personal experience with time shares

My first experience of a time share meeting came with a free holiday. A week in Tenerife, a popular summer holiday destination in the Canary Islands.

What is a time share?

Time Shares are a system, come under scrutiny in recent years, where you “buy” a percentage of holiday home or hotel. This generally equate as points which can be spent in multiple places, not just the location you “own”. But it can be a little more complicated than that. Full explanations can be found online such as this one by Forbes.

How did we have a free holiday?

A couple of years ago we went on holiday to the Canary Islands for “free” via a ‘timeshare’ company called CLC world or Club La Costa. We got a weeks “free” holiday when we had our windows done with Zenith. (Both companies that have gone into administration since!)

Somehow it started as 6 weeks we had 3 years to use in 3 different places next thing we knew we were given a month to book one weeks free holiday in Tenerife!!! But hay ho! We thought we would give it a go as it’s not somewhere we would normally go. The catch is that you have to attend a (long) meeting where they try and sell you timeshares, otherwise you have to pay for the room and of course you have to pay for your own flights etc.

Our time share meeting

Our meeting was booked for the Monday (day 3), we were collected from our room by our personal sales assistant and taken down to a waiting mini bus. This took us to Paradise (another resort similar to ours which was Monterey). Once there we had a free breakfast and met the manager for a “friendly” chat. You could tell that they were just trying to find personal information so that they could bond with you.

They were good sales people, showing us all the resorts all over the world and working out a personal plan showing you how great CLC world would be for you. So much so that you actually start falling for their 19 year plan!!!

The meeting goes on for 5 hours+ so you do start feeling worn down (and hungry!). Especially as we then went back on the mini bus to see the premium room right across from ours. Before having to drive back again to the other resort! Very annoying. However for a free holiday losing one day isn’t so bad, especially if you enjoy the resort style holiday. Also I can see how CLCs scheme would be useful for some people even if it wasn’t for us.

Tenerife

I’ve shared more about what to do in Tenerife in a separate post.

Tenerife itself a really nice place. I’m not sure I would go again however although I would of like to have seen the north of the island which sounds very different and more my sort of thing. The North is known as more rural and “real” less touristy-we only had time to stay in the south area.

But it was a really interesting experience and good to spend time with the family! I would recommend it as holiday option and I would visit the Canary Islands again. The Monterey resort was nice enough, nothing wrong with it at any rate, so I would stay there again too or similar.

What is your experience with time shares and time share meetings? Let me know in the comments!