The concept of “timeshare” originated in Europe in the early 1960’s and the whole idea has attracted regular tourists who regularly visit a resort to buy timeshare since it was introduced to them. Why? Basically, instead of renting a room for a week in a resort or hotel in a yearly basis, a timeshare owner are given the privilege to stay in a room of the hotel or resort for a week instead of paying accommodation expenses of that particular resort or hotel. Since then this concept has been widely famous for regular tourists in Europe and even in the US, wherein the ARDA International Foundation and the American Resort Development Association has been organized.

In the United Kingdom, the organization formed for the timeshare industry is the Resort Development Organisation. The growth of the timeshare industry of almost more than 40 years has increased to almost 3.2 million Euros, employing 70,000 people and was one of the thriving industry across Europe since the concept was developed.

Currently, statistics shows that there are at least 1,312 timeshares in Europe which is the equivalent to 67 million bed nights according to a London news report.

Since the booming industry has generated a large lump sum of income in Europe, they have coined a national legislation that will regulate the growing timeshare business. They adopted “The European Directive 94/47/EC” of the European Parliament and Council to protect timeshare contracts and purchase rights of timeshare owners.

According to Wikipedia, timeshare owners have their rights limited to the following:
• Use their usage time
• Rent out their owned usage
• Give it as a gift
• Exchange internally within the same resort or resort group
• Exchange externally into thousands of other resorts
• Sell it either through traditional advertising, online advertising or by using a licensed broker
Adding to this, owners may elect to the following conditions:

• Assign their usage time to the point system to be exchanged for airline tickets, hotels, travel packages, cruises, amusement park tickets;
• Instead of renting all their actual usage time, rent part of their points without actually getting any usage time and use the rest of the points;
• Rent more points from either the internal exchange entity or another owner to get a larger unit or more vacation time or at a better location;
• Save or move points from one year to another.

Once a timeshare owner wanted to sell their timeshare, the process can be done either through, TV advertising, online promotion or exchange their timeshares to other resorts that interests them. There are online sites that help sell your timeshare.