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Re: renting timeshare (by Maurice A.):

@karenm699, looking at rental performance at Ocean Pointe for January check-ins, year over year, the success rate appears to be up significantly.

Several of your recent postings have received quite a few inquiries (28 for one, 18 for another). Check your message box on the site to make sure you've received them all.

I assume though that the problem week was your Ocean Pointe rental for 1/26 - 2/2? Looks like you received only two inquiries for that one?

We had five postings for those exact dates (including yours). Of those, four of them rented. All of them had significantly lower prices than yours, so @ken1193 may be right that it was just the price (prices ranged from 44% to 15% lower than yours). We should do a better job of showing you competing prices during the posting process.

Note that you won't necessarily see all of the recent "rented" weeks on the inventory pages any longer. We started getting complaints about having to wade through too many rented results, esp. on mobile, so we're truncating those now.

I think pricing is the most likely culprit here, but you may also start seeing the effect of the "RedWeek Verified" postings. That's an optional enhancement that we offer where we independently verify the rental details (and you get the little green banner that says "verified"). That is continuing to gain in popularity (up ~ 100% YoY). So given two equivalent weeks, it's likely a renter will go for the verified one. We're working to make that process as efficient as possible and hope to decrease the price soon (currently $15), so more weeks can be verified.

Also, we've recently introduced RedWeek Payments. We haven't promoted it heavily yet, but it allows renters to book a week in a much more streamlined manner and to pay directly through the site. The goal being to eliminate that potential "unease" that @ken1193 referred to. I noticed that one of the Jan. 26 weeks was rented through that process. All "full-service" rentals use RedWeek Payments now. And all "RedWeek Verified" weeks are eligible, although we're currently phasing that in. Daily bookings through that process have more than doubled since mid December.

The point being that we are trying to differentiate the inventory in various ways to increase renter confidence, and that may, as a side effect, have some negative implications for folks who choose not to add those enhancements.

Anyway, I know that's little consolation after an unsuccessful rental, but I do hope that you'll continue to use us. Let me know if you have questions or have other suggestions on how we might continue to improve the success rate.