I’m No Social Media Marketing Expert, but I’m On Board! Will You Join Us?
We’re all back from RDO’s social media and digital strategy meeting, held in London late January, and, while I’m not that good at the technical side of social media marketing, I’m definitely a convert. One thing lots of people are already excited about is the new RDO Digital community we are about to launch for our members and their staff. This will be a platform where we will be hosting all kinds of training and discussion, and helping each other out as we work together to get better at social media and build up timeshare’s recognition and reputation. That said, I...
Has It Been An Annus Horribilis?
For those not latin scholars - and I include myself in this category (though not our youngest who got a B in his A2 Latin – should have been an A but that’s another story), this was the really bad year referred to by Queen Elizabeth 11nd, when she referred to 1992, the year three of her children were either divorced and/or separated ,including Princess Diana and Prince Charles and Windsor Castle had a serious fire. Not sure our own industry’s year has been quite such an annus horribilis, but I am referring here principally to the three Supreme Court rulings...
United We Stand, Divided We Fall…….
The full quote is “United we stand, divided we fall” and surprisingly it is originally attributed to Aesop of the fables fame in his fable “The four oxen and the lion” written in the 6th Century BC. I hit on this title today as I was walking our retriever (Falco – named after a Roman Detective whose books are set by Lindsey Davis in the time of the Emperor Vespasian), he doesn’t have Falco’s intelligence needless to say – well he wouldn’t being a retriever – “an intelligent retriever” is an oxymoron after all. I hit upon this title gazing...
From Aha to Kerching!
The title of Guy Browning’s presentation on Day 2 of RDO6 at the Don Carlos Hotel in Marbella, Spain, somehow sums up this year’s conference - more on that presentation later. This year I think those of us on the Conference working group were seriously concerned as to whether we could produce an event that exceeded the standard reached in London last year at RDO5. We need not have been so worried. From Michael Jackson’s (the other one) opening, which so accurately reflected the theme for this year of “Embracing Change” and taught us how not to over-complicate things, to resist the...
The Games Afoot……
As Sherlock Holmes was fond of telling Watson before embarking on his next adventure. The summer break is over for most of us and here in the UK we have had our last bank holiday before Christmas – where does the year go! It’s a time for renewal – stiffening the sinews and all that (and in our case recovering from a 5 hour traffic jam on the A6 in France – all due to the fact they had failed to take in some cones once they had knocked off from work at 5 pm!) – queue a mad rush...
Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life…..
So the song goes, and when we heard last week of the second ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court against Anfi Sales, it is fair to say there was a degree of disappointment, but after some initial reflection and review, the Python’s song title comes to mind and we need to move forward. The first ruling against Anfi Sales baffled most lawyers in the industry, as it appeared to fly in the face of the transitional provisions that the domestic Spanish legislation put in place back in 1998 to allow for existing timeshare schemes that were for more than 50 years....
Bit Early For The Silly Season…..
Apologies if this is a bit UK centric, but for those who are not aware, the last 2/3 weeks of August were and I believe still are, what we call “the silly season” – most politicians are away on holiday, so there is little news coming from Government and with Parliament in recess there is little or no gossip for the journalists to write about. They therefore have to resort to daft stories along the lines of (“ Freddie Starr ate my hamster”) or worse. The only reason I refer to this is that it would appear the silly season has...
Mr Cameron Goes To Europe………
With apologies to the original title – “Mr Deeds goes to town” (Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur 1936). I have noticed there have been a number of film title analogies over the past few months in these blogs ! I was in Berlin last month meeting with Klaus Juhl who runs RDO Germany in Berlin and we had a couple of useful meetings, one with Michael Rabe who is the Secretary General of BTW, which represents the travel and leisure industry in Germany, of which RDO is a member, and we also had a very useful meeting with an MP member...
The End Of April…. Hold The Front Page…..
Anyone who is a film buff will remember the 1974 Billy Wilder version of the 1931 film – The Front Page. The ’74 film starred Walter Matthau as the Editor and Jack Lemmon as his star crime reporter. It was originally a successful stage play and the fact it has been filmed I believe four times is testament to its success, needless to say I believe that Matthau and Lemmon produced by far the best and funniest version. The only reason I mention this, is because when it gets this late in the month and I haven’t written the monthly Blog,...
Did It All Change As Predicated?
Even if this gets put up on our website on in the first working-days of March, I will count it as February’s blog and if so I have managed so far to keep to my resolve of 1 blog a month – not sure anyone will be that interested but it leaves me with a warm glow if nothing else! These have been fraught days in our household, with A2 mocks being sat by the youngest member of our family, who decided last Friday evening that his eyes needed testing as he was having trouble seeing things on the board at...
