Travel: Timeshares

Little known historical facts about what is today a large industry, Vacation Timeshare, are soon to be published in a book authored by the operator of the world's oldest Internet timeshare website, Larry Hayden.

As the sole timeshare broker who was online on the Internet in the early 90's he shares his unique perspective and first-hand knowledge of the very beginnings of timeshare marketing on the Internet.

Back in 1991, which was before the Internet became popular, Larry was the only one marketing timeshare resales via electronic computer bulletin boards.

Bulletin boards were a very important part of corporate business for small and large businesses alike. Bulletin boards as they were used then have now disappeared with the advent of the Internet.

But, Larry recalls being fascinated by a book he read about a little known subject called the Internet.

As he read the book, he states that it quickly became obvious to him that vacation timeshare would be the perfect vehicle to market to a worldwide audience, and the Internet was a worldwide medium. After all, is there anyone in the entire world who doesn't like to vacation?

With computer bulletin boards, people had to place a long distance telephone call in order to connect and use the bulletin board. How marvelous it was that with the Internet, the connection did not require payment of a long distance telephone call.

Larry saw that his bulletin board would soon be moth-balled along with the several thousand dollars he had spent in programing the software for it.

The Internet was developed and used only by the government for non-commercial activities, so back in those days it was considered an abuse to post anything of a commercial nature, and the Internet purists predicted that commercial activity would be the end and downfall of the Internet.

Well, in effect, they were right. There was no way that such a powerful worldwide medium would not be used and overtaken by commercial interests, and the end of the Internet, at least as the purists had conceived it, did in fact take place. The connection was done via a telephone line, so anyone with a telephone had potential access to the online world.

Connection via a telephone line was the standard for a couple of years, but, behind the scene, entrepreneurial cable and telephone companies were feverishly working to develop the technology for a faster connection that is commonly known today as "broadband" meaning cable or dsl connectivity. Technology development to attain ever faster speeds continues to this day.

Back in the computer bulletin board days, Larry knew nothing about web design or html language.

HTML stands for hyper text markup language. It is the computer language source that causes web pages to display and read the way they do, such as the layout, the fonts displayed, the colors, the graphics, etc.

When you are viewing a web page, you can view the html code that creates the page you are viewing, by clicking on "view" then click on "source". So when web designers create a web page, they create the html, not what you are looking at when you view it online.

Larry has since learned a good deal about writing html and he wrote a good portion of what appears on his company website.

But back years ago, Larry hired someone to design his first website and launched it immediately. Back then there was only one search engine, Yahoo, and for the search term "timeshare" there was only one website that came up, which was Larry's. It actually remained that way for months.

Larry remembers talking to other timeshare brokers who seemed casually interested in the Internet but who really didn't seem to grasp the powerful marketing potential of the Internet as a worldwide medium.

But Larry's "monopoly" on Internet timeshare marketing was not to last long.

Larry states: "I remember the first time when some other company came up in the search engines, a now defunct company that was designed by a former employee of RCI. That marked the beginning of the end of my Internet timeshare "monopoly", and as the years progressed, untold numbers of companies, legitimate and otherwise have crowded the online world. I just did a search on Google for the term timeshare, and it returned 3,870,000 hits. That is a few more than my 1 hit years ago."

Says Larry, "I will leave it to you decide if the Internet is a good or a bad thing. Like all modern marvels it has elements of both. But I can't imagine the world without it now, can you?"

For more information, visit Larry's website at www.alltimeshare.com.

(PRWEB) December 17, 2005 --

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