Travel + Leisure Co. operates as a vacation ownership and membership travel company. The company provides vacation experiences and travel inspiration to millions of owners, members, and subscribers through its diverse portfolio of products and services.
Travel + Leisure Co. has the following segments:
Vacation Ownership includes the vacation ownership business with 809,000 owners and more than 270 vacation club resort locations. The company provides vacation ownership experiences under some of...
Travel + Leisure Co. operates as a vacation ownership and membership travel company. The company provides vacation experiences and travel inspiration to millions of owners, members, and subscribers through its diverse portfolio of products and services.
Travel + Leisure Co. has the following segments:
Vacation Ownership includes the vacation ownership business with 809,000 owners and more than 270 vacation club resort locations. The company provides vacation ownership experiences under some of the most popular hospitality and leisure brands, including Club Wyndham, Margaritaville Vacation Club, and Accor Vacation Club. The business is developing a new experiential product celebrating the Sports Illustrated brand in the U.S.
Travel and Membership includes the company’s Exchange and Travel Club business lines. RCI is the world’s largest exchange company with 3.4 million members and 3,600 affiliated resorts in its network. Its Travel Club business line includes: RCI travel club, which seeks to capture a greater share of its members non-exchange travel budgets; and business-to-business (‘B2B’) travel clubs, which offer private-label solutions to associations, organizations, and other closed user groups.
Strategy
The company focuses on leisure travel. Its strategy is to accelerate the growth of its global businesses by broadening the strength of its cornerstone timeshare business through a multi-brand expansion strategy, and its exchange businesses by creating depth of leisure travel products and services through growth of travel clubs. The key pillars to the company’s strategies are to enhance its upgrade pipeline through the addition of new owners; maximize its relationship with Wyndham Hotels; and adding leisure or hospitality brands to its existing portfolio.
Business Descriptions
In 2024, the company generated 45% of its revenues from the sale of vacation ownership interests, 42% from its fee-for-service revenue streams, 12% from its consumer financing revenue stream, and 1% from other ancillary revenue streams.
The company’s businesses have both domestic and international operations. During 2024, the company derived 88% of its revenues in the United States (‘U.S.’) and 12% internationally.
Vacation Ownership
The company’s Vacation Ownership reportable segment is substantially consisted of the vacation ownership product lines: Club Wyndham, WorldMark by Wyndham, Margaritaville Vacation Club, and Accor Vacation Club; and is the vacation ownership business based on number of resorts and owners. It develops and acquires vacation ownership resorts, markets and sells VOIs, provides consumer financing for the majority of the vacation ownership interest (VOI) sales, and provides property management services to property owners’ associations. As of December 31, 2024, the company had more than 270 vacation ownership resorts in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Asia Pacific that represent 27,700 individual vacation ownership units and 809,000 owners of VOIs. The company’s programs allow it to market and sell its vacation ownership products in variable quantities and to offer existing owners ‘upgrade’ sales to supplement their existing VOIs.
In 2023, the company introduced a new concept for a network of sports-themed resort and lifestyle complexes in popular college towns and leisure destinations under the Sports Illustrated Resorts brand. It is still early in the development of the Sports Illustrated Resorts portfolio.
Sales and Marketing
The company employs a variety of marketing channels to encourage prospective owners of VOIs to tour its properties and attend sales presentations at its resort-based sales centers, as well as offsite sales offices. The company’s resort-based sales centers also enable it to actively solicit upgrade sales to existing owners of VOIs while they vacation at its resorts. Additionally, it operates telesales and virtual sales programs designed to reach and solicit upgrade sales to existing owners it was not able to market to during their vacations.
The company’s marketing and sales activities are often facilitated through marketing alliances with other travel, hospitality, entertainment, gaming, and retail companies that provide access to such companies’ customers through a variety of co-branded marketing offers. Its resort-based sales centers, which are located in popular travel destinations throughout the U.S., generate substantial tour flow by enabling it to market to tourists already visiting these destinations. The company’s marketing agents, who often operates on the premises of the hospitality, entertainment, gaming, and retail companies with which it has alliances, solicit tourists with offers relating to entertainment activities and other incentives in exchange for the tourists visiting the local resorts and attending sales presentations.
Consumer Financing
The company offers financing to purchasers of VOIs, which attracts additional customers and generates substantial incremental revenues and profits. Domestically, it funds and service loans through its wholly-owned consumer financing subsidiary, Wyndham Consumer Finance. Wyndham Consumer Finance performs loan financing, servicing, and related administrative functions, including customer service, billing, and collection activities.
Property Management
On behalf of each of the property owners’ associations, the company or its affiliates generally provides day-to-day management for vacation ownership resorts, which includes oversight of housekeeping services, maintenance, and refurbishment of the units, and provide certain accounting and administrative services to property owners’ associations. The initial terms of the property management agreements are generally between three to five years; however, the vast majority of the agreements provide a mechanism for an automatic one year renewal upon expiration of the terms.
Seasonality
The company relies, in part, upon tour flow to generate sales of VOIs; consequently, sales volume tends to increase in the spring and summer months as a result of greater tour flow from travelers, generally resulting in higher revenue from sales of VOIs in the third quarter than in other quarters (year ended December 2024).
Travel and Membership
The company’s Travel and Membership segment consists of Exchange and Travel Club business lines.
Within Exchange, the company operates RCI, the world’s largest vacation exchange network based on the number of members and affiliated resorts. Through its collection of vacation exchange brands, the company has 3.4 million paid member families.
The company’s vacation exchange business has relationships with affiliated vacation ownership resorts in 101 countries and territories located in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific.
Strategy
The key strategies followed by the company is to expand and enhance its products and services to increase wallet share, transaction propensity, and retention within its member base; and expand B2B travel solutions.
Sales and Marketing
In the exchange business, the company affiliates with vacation ownership developers directly through its in-house sales teams. Affiliated vacation ownership developers sign agreements that have an average duration of five years. Its vacation exchange members are acquired primarily through the company’s affiliated developers as part of the vacation ownership purchase process. The company acquires a small percentage of its members directly from online channels.
Travel clubs collaborate with affinity groups outside of the vacation ownership industry. The company distributes its products and services through proprietary websites and call centers around the world.
Seasonality
The company’s revenues from vacation exchange fees have traditionally been higher in the first quarter (year ended December 31, 2024), which is generally when its vacation exchange members plan and book their vacations for the year ended December 2024.
Intellectual Property
The company actively uses or licenses for use all significant marks and domain names, and it owns or has exclusive licenses to use these marks and domain names. In connection with the Spin-off, the company entered into a license, development, and noncompetition agreement with Wyndham Hotels, which, among other things, granted to Travel + Leisure Co. the right to use the ‘Wyndham’ trademark, ‘The Registry Collection’ trademark, and certain other trademarks and intellectual property in its business.
Government Regulation
Some laws, regulations, and policies impact multiple areas of the company’s business, such as securities, anti-discrimination, anti-fraud, data protection and security and anti-corruption, and bribery laws and regulations or government economic sanctions, including applicable regulations under the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control and the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (‘FCPA’).
The company is generally subject to laws and regulations applicable to real estate development, subdivision, and construction activities, such as laws relating to zoning, land use restrictions, environmental regulation, accessibility, title transfers, title insurance, and taxation. In the U.S., these include the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Accessibility Guidelines promulgated thereunder.
A wide variety of laws and regulations govern the company’s sales and marketing activities, including regulations implementing the USA PATRIOT Act, Foreign Investment In Real Property Tax Act, the federal Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act and fair housing statutes, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and states’ ‘Little FTC Acts’ and other regulations governing unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices, including unfair or deceptive trade practices and unfair competition, state attorney general regulations, anti-fraud laws, prize, gift and sweepstakes laws, laws governing discount sales and buying clubs, real estate, title agency or insurance and other licensing or registration laws and regulations, anti-money laundering, consumer information privacy and security, breach notification, information sharing, telemarketing and email marketing laws, home solicitation sales laws, tour operator laws, lodging certificate and seller of travel laws, securities laws, subscription laws, and other consumer protection laws.
History
The company was founded in 1990. It was incorporated in 2003. The company was formerly known as Wyndham Destinations, Inc. and changed its name to Travel + Leisure Co. in 2021.