Loch Rannoch Highland Club Forums

Social media, especially sites such as trip adviser and booking.com are where most visitors to our beloved "timeshare" club leave reviews.

It is also the 2 sites where those who may be considering a visit to the club would no doubt be viewing.

But I can't help, but think we are missing a massive trick here by not responding to all the various reviews whether good or bad.

Replies can show an element of one's personality and create a level of engagement which in turn can create interest in the Club and buying signals.

Surely we have sufficient experience within the Club which can create a culture of interest by using some individualism and ownership of such a no brainer?

Wrote this in March this year and I still can't understand why as a club we fail to deliver where and when it is needed.

We have had a massive opportunity over the past 9 months on various platforms, BUT?

Try again this March, Stuart.
You might stand a chance of getting an answer one year on, especially since you are a valued perpetuity owner.
Your input is valued

They did eventually begin to respond to some renter feedback but whether it was a human response is up for discussion.

The replies are all so similar and lack any empathy.

Possibly stock answers copied and pasted from a list and then tweaked here and there to make it look like a genuine response.
Could be wrong about that though

I do wish as a club we would be more charismatic when answering renters who have made comments good or bad offering constructive feedback and even praise to different parts of the club and other establishment.

The use of AI in replies is not what I would expect when as a club we are trying to attract ownership and what makes it even more non empathetic is when the poster praises other establishments and this is ignored, but when criticised, comment it's not part of club.

Some people have to learn how to nurture success by showing empathy and charisma, which is something AI cannot.

I can't say on this forum what I really want to say as when you tell the truth there is a very good chance that those people concerned go running to committee complaining rather than take responsibility.

What I can say though is that failure in this area is not an option as it can encourage interest in sales and after wasting at least £70k or more i believe of owners hard earned money on unqualified "salespeople" who have relinquished that position,maybe there have to be changes and an acceptance of not delivering.

However this is an area which needs addressing pretty quickly to individualise and personalise replies to make the Club, using a previous committee members words, a differentiator.

So the question i still ask is why are the people at the club responsible for this so bad at this or is it that they are not interested?

Re poor sales: it doesn’t come as any surprise to me , the Committee having decided to alienate Term
Owners and strip them of all rights other than to occupy the week which they pay for. Term ownership was a good seller previously for obvious reasons but that will most probably no longer apply due to the discriminatory attitude towards them.
Guaranteed that few Term owners will renew to another term when reaching the end of their contract.
I sometimes wonder

Can't disagree with your comments.

Maybe we have the " Department of No Sales" lol.

Seriously though as a Club we are missing the obvious and what is even more obvious is, we have failed to capitilise on this and even after the newsletter stating a 3 day conference to take place unless the commitment to succeed is shown by the management, and I don't mean committee, then we have a problem.

This commitment and belief as well as ability has been non existent even though club owners have paid the wages of failure in sales.

I'll make a few comments on this thread. Regarding the jibe "Department of No Sales" I've heard that many times before but not at the Club. I'll ignore it.

Regarding the three day conference this was the invention of the General Manager, not the Committee, who were nevetheless delghted with the suggestion. No doubt there will be comments that we shouldn't waste time with a conference but should listen to people sitting in armchairs. But your Committee and management take their roles seriously and the best practice when you have an issue is to dissect it thoroughly and work out the way forward.This conference is scheduled to take place before the AGM and we shall report on it at the AGM.

On the subject of sales it is likely that timeshare sales must be one of the hardest sales in the country. Forty years ago people wanted to come to us or any other Scottish resort for a full week and timeshare around the world has been built on that premise. But things have changed, particularly amongst the young. They want to come to Rannoch for two or three days then move on to another destination. The growth of Booking.com and others has made this much simpler. So if there is a fixed number of visitors wanting to come to Scotland rather than Torremelinos or Florida, then a much smaller nmber of these people will want to join us as Members. We are certainly not alone with this problem. As a member of the trade association Euroc, we learn about the difficulties that others have. Interestingly if you take the example of Cameron House, held by many to be the most luxurious and successful site in Scotland, I understand that they no longer have a sales program and when lodges are relinquished they simply put them all for rent. We are not going down that route and despite the remarks made by a small number we will fight this battle to the end. We are after all a Members' Club and of course every Committee Member is a Club Member.

Remarks have been made that we prioritise renters. Let me comment. Firstly my own preference is that in an ideal world every lodge week would be "owned" by a Club Member. Therefore we would have no renters. But as your Chairman I live in the real world, not an armchair. I am part of a team which from time to time has to make difficlt and not always universally popular decisions. When I returned to the present Committee four or five years ago the Club was not in a good state. There was dissatisfction about many things but it was quickly obvious to the new Committee that the finances were not in good shape, a lot of it being due to there being more and more empty lodges. Put simply, a lodge being empty means there is no annual management fee coming in and very roughly that equates to £500 per annum. I'm well aware that the figure varies by lodge type but for crude calculations £500 is a useful starting-point. I then asked Nick Pattie, who forty years ago managed the whole site when lodges were being sold at a very high rate. He told me that they used to sell about 500 lodges every year and had six sales people on site to achieve that. They could afford that because lodges were each sold for several thousand pounds of which a high percentage was allocated to marketing costs. Against that we can only just afford one sales person and have recently been critcised for that. We sell lodges for a fraction of the price of the old days, not because we want to but simply that is what new Members will pay. On that basis a single sales person might be expected to sell 80 lodges per annum despite the fact that none of the old advantages would be in his favour. So 80 sales might bring in extra annual fees of £40,000 as a maximum. But looking forard this was not enough to stabilise the Club finances. So the only alternative other than to hike the fees was to rent out the empty lodges. Initially we used Scotland Retreat to achieve rental but their offereing was around full weeks. It didn't work out. We had also asked somebody to take on sales independently but this didn't work either. Richard's immediate predecesor suggested we should try doing our own rentals concentrating on part weeks. When Richard came on board he immediately increased rentals by a huge amount and that continues to this day with full Committee suport. Because our finances were still tight then all our effort went into rentals to bring cash in. It is much easier to get rentals in than sales because it is a matter of listing your lodges with Booking.com and similar companies, getting your pricing right,and soon the business comes in - many times faster than chasing sales. The main difficulty is operational. We have gone from three changeover days to seven. The organisation of this is immense and the staff have had to get used to this new way of working. Of course there have been comments on here that because it is more stressful on the staff that we should quit remtals. The bit that's never mentioned is that yes we could cease avertising rentals tomorow, but then either the Club would eventually fail, leading to an outsider getting it for nothing whilst the Members would still be paying fees, or of course we could simply raise management fees to unprecedented levels.

Whilst all these changes were taking place we stopped active selling of lodges. Of course if anybody wanted to buy they still could do. Once we stabilised the finances we re-addressed sales, where we have had less than optimum success, which leads us to the need for our forthcoming sales workshop. From time to time people on here poke fun at Richard Deak about sales. We needed a General Manager and the clue is in the job title, we needed an all-rounder. From his many years building the Dunalastair hotel up to 5 star standard he was the stand out candidate. Of course you don't become a timeshare sales expert building up a 5 star hotel, because the hotel business is more like a rental operation. But once he saw the advantages of bringing in more timeshare members he set about it wih his usual zeal. He knows it is very much a long term project and that rentals will have to continue for a similar lengthy period but he is as enthusiastic as the whole Committee. One last thing to report. For rental we used to require a couple of days notice when being booked.A couple of monhs ago we dropped that and you can now book for that night as late as lunchtime same day. Doing this increased the stress on all but rental income in September increased by around 30% over last year. A hard decision but if it enables us t maintain your fees around the national CPC level of approximately 3% then plese remember that.

Best wishes, John

Some things just don’t seem to add up. The poor sales record at LRHC is nothing new and a few have repeatedly raised this issue over many years both on the forum and at AGM’s. So why has it now all come to a head which requires a 3 day conference when in fact a half day discussion or perhaps a cost effective Zoom conference would suffice?
There’s only so much which can be discussed and it will probably be a repeat of everything said in the past.
Indeed about 4 years ago was it not suggested that since nobody wanted to commit to in perpetuity due to the financial situation nationally and that Term ownership was to be the way forward in the main?
Since then the Committee at very short notice put a resolution to the 2024 AGM to propose that all Term owners to be stripped of all rights other than to occupy the week(s) which they pay for. This was voted through by the members who did vote on the resolution and in effect all Term owners immediately became alienated from club affairs and the reason given was “ that they did not have the long term interests of the club” at heart. Who decided this and what evidence is this based on.? At least 1 Term owner has deep rooted Rannoch connections from a time before LRHC was even built and has the interests of the owner’s and employees in mind and to suggest otherwise is offensive.
In any case with the shoddy treatment Term owners have received, I suspect that few will renew membership to another term when their current contract ends.
Not the best sales tactic for a group of owners who were considered to possibly be the future of the club