WorldMark the Club -- relationship with Wyndham
There is a BUNCH of confusion, even among the
most active and involved of owners, over who WorldMark, Wyndham,
WorldMark By Wyndham, Cendant, and Trendwest are, and what the relationship is among all
these entities. I am going to try to explain it.
There are actually three separate entities involved in our vacation ownership program: the Developer, the Club, and the Manager.
The Developer builds or purchases the resorts and hands them over to
the Club (more on that in a minute) debt-free. In exchange, the Club
has given the Developer the exclusive right to market and sell the
Vacation Credits that are generated by the new units. So it would be more accurate to say that the Club
"buys" the new resorts from the Developer by giving the Developer those
Credits to sell.
The Developer
determines how many Vacation Credits are generated by each new unit by
assigning Credit Values (how many credits required to stay in each
unit) and Season Calendars (how many red, white, and blue weeks per
year for the resort).
WorldMark, the Club is the entity that owns all of the
resorts/units, and the entity in which we as individuals hold
ownership. We purchase WorldMark, the Club Vacation Credits. Yes, we
buy them FROM the Developer, but it is like buying a Ford from ABC Car
Dealership or from the guy around the block (if you buy resale). You
are not buying the dealership, you are buying a Ford. Those Credits are
the same as buying stock in a publicly traded Corporation. They give us
partial ownership of the Club, and the Club owns the units.
The Club has no employees and no way to manage the units directly.
So they hire a Manager to handle the physical management of the
properties as well as the operations of the Club (reservation system,
financial records, annual election, etc).
When WorldMark (then called Club Esprit) was initially conceived in
1989, it was created hand-in-hand with Trendwest Resorts. Trendwest was
the Developer and the Manager, and WorldMark the owner. They were
created together to support one another. As the Board has frequently
pointed out, the two were inter-dependent; neither could survive
without the other. And that was fine; it really was a case of "what is
good for one is good for the other".
When Trendwest and WorldMark were created, Jeld-Wen (a window and
door company) was the parent company of Trendwest. In 1997, Trendwest
went public but Jeld-Wen maintained 51% of the stock.
Then in 2002, Cendant purchased Trendwest. Cendant was a huge
conglomerate that owned not only timeshare developers (formerly
Fairfield and Trendwest, among others), but also real estate firms
(Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA); hotels (Super 8, Days Inn, Ramada,
Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Baymont Inn & Suites, Wingate by
Wyndham, Travelodge, Howard Johnson, AmeriHost Inn, Knights Inn); and
travel and car rental companies (RCI, Orbitz, Galileo, Avis, Budget,
and more).
In 2006, Cendant split itself up into four separate companies --
Realogy for the real estate firms, Wyndham Worldwide for the timeshare
and hotel companies, Travelport for the travel distribution companies,
and Avis Budget Group for the car rentals. The official line is that
Cendant had become too big to be managed profitably. The scuttlebutt is
that it may have had more to do with getting rid of the Cendant name
and reputation after convictions of fraudulent accounting practices (
See CNN: Cendant settles for 2.93 BILLION and USA Today: Cendant ex-chairman found guilty).
So now Wyndham Resort Development Corporation (WRDC), a division of
Wyndham Vacation Ownership which is a division of Wyndham Worldwide, is
the Developer and Manager for WorldMark, the Club. It's also important
to note that WRDC has a dba as "WorldMark by Wyndham" and is freely
calling themselves that.
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