The European Timeshare Industry 2008.

Published by the Resort Development Organisation (RDO).

Authored by The Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute, University of Nottingham, UK.

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Executive summary

General characteristics of the timeshare industry in Europe

• In 2007 over 1.5 million European households owned timeshare.
• The UK and Ireland form the largest market having 589,653 timeshare owners, followed by Germany and Italy.
• Most resorts are concentrated in Spain with 26.3% of the total, 14.94% in Italy and 11.05% in the UK & Ireland.
• There were a total of 1,312 resorts in Europe.
• The total number of units in European resorts is 73,540, resulting in 67,590 million bed nights.
• Average occupancy levels across completed European resorts were 71.7%.

Economic impacts of the timeshare industry in Europe

• € 3.2 billion of expenditure was generated by the European timeshare industry in 2007.
• European timeshare owners spent € 1.6 billion during their timeshare vacation, plus
• € 957 million on timeshare purchases and € 618 million on timeshare maintenance fees.
• The top spending market is the UK generating € 1.4 billion (about half the total expenditure) in timeshare.
• The average expenditure per trip (or vacation) was € 1,588 per family, which was mainly spent on restaurants, car rental, parking and petrol, groceries, accommodation and gifts, souvenirs and clothes.
• In terms of employment, a total of 69,836 jobs are directly sustained by the timeshare industry.
• The overall employment costs for the timeshare developers sector across all resorts is € 1.28 billion (€ 1.06 billion if considering only resorts on the twelve European countries of this study).