Background & Challenge
Club Wyndham is a vacation timeshare operator offering access to multiple worldwide destinations. However they were experiencing high levels of dissatisfaction from new owners who were seeking to exit their contracts within the first three months of joining. However, long-term owners were expressing high levels of loyalty and satisfaction.
Research & Insights
Qualitative one-on-one interviews were conducted with current, former and prospective timeshare owners which uncovered several key insights about the human emotional experience.
- New owners had high expectations but were focusing narrowly on booking their first vacation only and were disappointed when there was no availability.
- The root cause was the design of the online booking process, which imitated typical travel booking sites by asking owners to select travel dates first. This led to failure 90% of the time due to limited inventory.
- The frustration felt resurfaced doubts that had been dispelled during the (very hard) sales experience, ie ‘Is this a scam?’
Solution: Shift from WHEN to WHERE
Change the mindset from ‘The Vacation of a Lifetime’ to ‘A Lifetime of Vacations’. The shift was to inspire them to identify all the different vacations they could enjoy in their lifetime: to create their vacation ‘Bucket List’.
IMPLEMENTATION: A REIMAGINED ONBOADING EXPERIENCE
- Highly visual and inspiring content on different destinations and the breadth of choice
- Destination recommendations based on the experiences the user enjoys
- Intuitive map-based interfaces to easily identify availability options
This approach validated their decision to embrace a new lifetime of vacations and significantly reduced those seeking to exit their contracts.