Narrowboat Timeshare - our experience
We fist encountered the idea of Timeshare ownership via a street salesman who invited us to a "seminar". at the time we were concerned that we were so appalling at arranging holidays that they were simply not happening holidays so the idea of Timeshare ownership with a definite holiday booked every year appealed and we we were soon owners of a Narrowboat week - the second week of January ( it was cheap and we thought we could exchange it for something useful).
A few months later the cruel realities of what we could actually exchange it for began to dawn on us and we upgraded to an August week I think the first holiday we took was August 2002, which went well and at the end of the week we bought a second week, so we now owned two consecutive August weeks allowing us to take longer breaks.Augusts 2003 and 4 we enjoyed two week family holidays, but decided that we would like to do something else for 2005. Reviewing the costs of exchanging the weeks at that time, we were not sure it was worth while, so we decided to rent the weeks out. This immediately presented the problems of marketing and so I created the website www.canalbarge.co.uk. With the help of the management company Shakespeare Classic Line ltd this proved and immediate success and has gone from strength to strength since.
We then purchased two further "second-hand" weeks which other people were trying to dispose of leaving us with 4 Shakespeare Classic Line Timeshare weeks, which we either used, or rented out ,using the profits to pay for other holidays.
If we have regrets, they would be that we did not learn a bit more about timeshare before venturing in, which would have saved us a bit of money and a few mistakes, but those mistakes were the fair price of learning and probably inevitable to some extent, any way.
All in all, it has gone remarkably well and given has both holidays and a new interest, in the canals and the website, though the learning curve has been quite steep at times. especially learning about how to setup and manage a website.
I suppose the main lesson is that if you want to sell something you need a cost effective and viable means of marketing, which the website has provided us with.
Postcard in shop windows don't often work and those people who where successfully advertising weeks prior to the website being set up were having to spend literally hundreds of ponds on newspaper ads, though those ads sold several weeks, as a group of people shared the cost.
Whether the enormous amount of time spent creating and nurturing the website has been cost effective or not is a matter of doubt. It has certainly provided an effective marketing solution ,it is true, but were the work put into it charged at £5 an hour the newspaper ads would undoubtedly look a cheaper solution, though this will hopefully rectify itself with time.
