Options

Getting out of a Timeshare that you have just bought

If you have just bought a Timeshare and wish to cancel you need to move quickly. The European Shared Ownership Directive grants purchasers a 14 day cooling off period throughout Europe. During that period it is possible to cancel your purchase without needing to give a reason.

Even if you bought outside the 14 day cooling off period it may still be possible to cancel your contract under basic contract law if you have been lied to or put under pressure to buy. Do not try and do this yourself – we have seen many clients try this and have ended up making their situation worse.

Getting out of Timeshare that you have owned for some time.

People have been buying Timeshare for many years and indeed many of them have been happy with the actual resort and their use of the weeks. Unfortunately over recent years maintenance fees have increased substantially in many resorts and owners have now reached the stage where the economics of their Timeshare Ownership simply do not add up – they no longer use their weeks as much as they did in the past and find that the maintenance fees are no longer reasonable or palatable. Unfortunately owners felt trapped by the maintenance fees and, even worse, were told that their children would inherit the problem when they died.

In the past there were several possible solutions to the rising Maintenance Fee problems;

•  Sell the Timeshare to somebody else.

Timeshare used to have a value on the second hand market. As maintenance fees have increased owners have now found that they can’t even give away their Timeshare weeks, let alone sell them. We have seen people willing to pay somebody to take their Timeshare off their hands and haven’t been able to find somebody.

Unfortunately there are lots of scams associated with trying to resell Timeshare. Often an owner is told that a buyer for the weeks has already been found and that the price is much higher than you would normally expect. The way that these scams work is that you pay an up front fee for “taxes”, “admin fees”, “Notary fees” or something similar. The seller never materialises and you are then left still with your Timeshare but also having lost more money in the scam.

• Ignore the Maintenance Fee requests.

This often resulted in the Resort simply repossessing the weeks and the owner managing to walk away. Recently however many resorts have stopped doing this as they do not wish to have their members walk away and have the resulting reduction in maintenance fees.

• Give the weeks back to the resort

In theory you should be able to give your Timeshare weeks back to the resort. This is a similar concept to Handing back the keys of your property to the bank should you not be able to keep up the mortgage payments. Many resorts used to accept this but increasingly they will refuse for the same reasons that they refuse to accept the repossession due to not payment.

None of the above solutions were guaranteed to work and in fact sometimes lead to more problems if the person putting the solution into place didn’t do so properly.

If you own Timeshare in Spain or Portugal then Judicare now have another option available to you. Although this solution has been successfully tried and tested on many occasions it may not work in all situations. Currently the solution only applies to Timeshare in Spain or Portugal although we are working on similar solutions for other countries. The solution is also only viable in certain circumstances. As such we would need to go through your contract to see whether the solution would work for you. We therefore offer a FREE Initial Assessment whereby we go through the documentation to establish whether you have a case.

If the solution does work for you we would charge £500 plus 7% IGIC (Impuesto General Indirecto Canario - the equivalent of VAT in Tenerife), making a total of £535.00 for Spanish cases. For Portuguese cases the cost is slightly higher at £700 plus 7% IGIC making a total of £749. We were keen to find a solution that came out about the same or less than the cost of Annual Maintenance Fees and believe that with typical maintenance fees of between £500 and £1,000 a week we have been successful in doing exactly that.

If you would like us to carry out a Free Initial Assessment of your case please contact us on 01438 840258 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it