Timeshare companies aren’t hard to find. Go to any vacation destination you can think of — Las Vegas, Nevada; Honolulu, Hawaii; Cape Canaveral or Orlando, Florida — and you’ll find salespeople eager to reel you in to an hours-long timeshare sales presentation.
Holiday Inn Club Vacations Incorporated, also known as HICV or Holiday Inn Vacation Club, is one of these timeshare companies. It banks on you recognizing the Holiday Inn name, which has been used by a trusted hotel operator for almost 70 years. And it uses that goodwill in a bid to convince you that it is a trustworthy timeshare company, here to help you and your family create lasting memories.
If you look at Holiday Vacation Club reviews, the reality is not so pretty. This article will take a look at Holiday Inn Vacation Club and its customer complaints. We’ll also discuss alternatives to joining the club.
Finally, if you’re a timeshare owner and you need to get out of a bad deal, we can help you too. We’ll talk about your options and the best way to achieve a legal, ethical timeshare exit with Centerstone Group.
The Holiday Inn name is owned by Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) and was licensed to Orange Lake Resorts to create Holiday Inn Vacation Club. The Holiday Inn brand has been attached to a range of full-service and budget hotels since 1952. The Vacation Club is considerably newer, having been launched in September of 2008.
The Holiday Inn Vacation Club timeshares appear to work on a points-based system, much like Marriott Vacation Club or Disney Vacation Club. One owner reports being told that she was receiving a deed – presumably to an actual, on-site piece of property – but that she did not actually own a deed anywhere.
Its offerings are considerably narrower in scope than some other timeshare programs. While they typically offer two- and three-bedroom villas with golf courses, lazy rivers, and easy theme park access, there are not as many of these resorts as you might expect. In fact, there are only 28 timeshare resorts in the Holiday Inn Vacation Club network, and all of those are in the continental United States.
Prospective timeshare owners can learn quite a bit about the Holiday Inn Vacation Club from comments left online. A look at the various HICV reviews will reveal a few areas of concern that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Here, we’ll highlight a few of those concerns.
The Holiday Inn Vacation Club reviews show that the experience of being an owner in the Holiday Inn Vacation Club is depressingly like the experience with other, bigger timeshare companies. Chief among the problems is the high-pressure sales experience, which remains the same here as with other companies.
The constant sales pitches don’t end, though, once you have purchased your unit. If anything, you are now a captive audience every time you check in to a timeshare property for vacation. A particularly angry customer in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, described the club as “a scam and a cult.”
Club members report being continuously pushed to buy more points soon after check-in, sometimes even before they’ve left the front desk. You can also expect to be offered an IHG Hotels rewards credit card to keep you in the system.
As we noted above, Holiday Inn Vacation Club is not a very big timeshare company, and it has fewer resorts than many of its competitors. That fact leaves very little vacation space for a lot of owners to fight over. One review in late 2023 characterized the situation as “a very limited number of rooms available for club members.”
It doesn’t help that from the beginning the Vacation Club membership limits you to locations like the flagship Orange Lake Resort in Orlando, the New Orleans Resort, or the Great Smoky Mountain Resort in Gatlinburg. If you want more destinations to choose from, you’ll need to enroll in a separate timeshare exchange program like RCI. And, as you can probably guess, that means you’ll have to shell out even more money just to use the timeshare that you have already purchased.
To add insult to injury, many owners find that the properties that they reserve for vacation aren’t even that nice. Some Holiday Inn Vacation Club reviews have complained about room cleanliness and properties being in general disrepair.
Perhaps most tellingly, one owner on Yelp described it as “the worst timeshare we have ever owned,” comparing it with both Marriott and Diamond Resorts. Given that both of those timeshare companies have had significant problems, the comparison to them strikes one as particularly severe.
Even if you could bear all the above difficulties, you’ll also have the same problems with the timeshare company that people have with competitors. Holiday Inn Vacation Club reviews show high maintenance fees are a common problem. So you can expect your costs to continue to climb as the years go on.
All the negative Holiday Inn Vacation Club reviews are probably enough proof that you should seek other family vacation options. But let’s also look at the true costs of vacation ownership with HICV.
According to Holiday Inn Vacation Club’s website, the average cost to its new members for a timeshare points membership is $15,870. That cost alone is too great for most owners to pay upfront, so they often get mortgages to pay for their timeshares. The interest and fees on a mortgage will add to that initial price.
But you’re not done with the fees yet. According to the American Resort Development Association (ARDA), the average amount of maintenance fees (whether at Holiday Inn Vacation Club or elsewhere) is $1,000 per year.
Add that to a mortgage payment of $200 per month (or more), membership fees, and any other special assessments, and you could be paying $4,000 per year for a week at your timeshare. No fitness center, fancy resort swimming pool, or mini-golf course in the world could possibly be worth that.
To put that in perspective, if you put that $4,000 toward a hotel in any of these destinations, you would have over $570 to spend per night, which would easily get you a luxury hotel room at the finest resorts. Or, you could halve that amount to $235 per night — still a very nice hotel room — and take a two-week getaway instead.
If what you want is value for your money; clean, stress-free accommodations; and higher service levels, you have thousands of hotels vying for your business. They all have swimming pools, spas, and free Wi-Fi just like the timeshare resorts, but at a fraction of the price and no high-pressure sales meetings that suck away your precious vacation time. When you consider these other options, buying a timeshare just doesn’t make any sense.
But what if you didn’t see this article until after you signed a contract and became an owner with Holiday Inn Vacation Club? You’re already losing money, they won’t stop trying to sell you another “vacation package” (i.e., more points), and you feel like you’re trapped.
You’re in a bad situation, but you’re definitely not trapped. Centerstone Group is a company that was founded by people with collective decades of experience in the timeshare industry. We know the ins and outs of these companies and how they make decisions. We can put our knowledge to work in order to find you the relief you need.
Perhaps you have been trying to get out of your contract for some time, and Holiday Inn Vacation Club is ignoring you or failing to honor its agreement. In that case, we can use our proprietary pressure campaign techniques to pursue them with correspondence, administrative complaints, and other means to convince them to do the right thing.
Some cases require a more in-depth legal approach. In those instances, we can also help. We maintain relationships with several attorneys and law firms who specialize in contract and timeshare work. If you need to go to court or find another legal answer, we can help guide you through that process with more favorable attorney fee rates than you would get otherwise.
But don’t take our word for it. Listen to our clients. Centerstone Group is accredited by the Better Business Bureau. We hold an A+ letter grade and an excellent 4.76-out-of-5-star rating. The reviews tell the rest of the story.
Vacations are expensive. You should make sure that the memories you get from your next destination are worth the money. In the case of Holiday Inn Vacation Club, the owners tell you all you need to know. Instead of relaxing, luxurious vacation ownership, they are getting stress, headaches, and a large annual bill.
Getting involved with this company, or any timeshare company at all, is risky and usually disappointing for the majority of people. It’s in your best interest to stay away.
But if you’ve already committed and find yourself stuck, there is hope. Contact Centerstone Group today for a free consultation and additional information. We’ll take a look at your situation and let you know the best plan for getting you the timeshare exit you need.
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