Board member Marie Bowman has produced a flyer for all members of the Sint Maarten Timeshare Owners Association to take to St. Maarten to pass out and advertise our association. The flyer is available on the website www.sxmtsoa.com as a PDF file, click the link and then print the flyer on your computer. Non-members may also distribute the flyer, please feel free to do so.
Currently we have over 150 active members of the association, we expect to reach our 200th founding member in the next few weeks. After the 200th member the “founding members” category will be closed forever. Now is the time to join. Please visit the website Sint Maarten Owners Timeshare Association to join.
With the increases in Flamingo/Royal Palm 2010 AMF these resorts are now the highest AMF’s on Sint Maarten. Many of the owners have indicated this may be their last year as timeshare owners. A two bedroom unit AMF is over $1300, the average for all the other St. Maarten timeshare resorts is near the $800 mark which make the Flamingo/Royal Palm nearly 60% higher than the average, this fee has to be justified by the resort management. The increase for 2010 was near $150 much higher than the 5% increase of the CPI of the NA index used by many of the resorts. What justification does Diamond Resorts use for such a large increase two years in a row.
This is on of the reason the SXMTSOA is needed at this time. We propose to have the St. Maarten government step in to control this clear violation of the principles of timeshare ownership. None of the current owners at these resorts would have bought their units if they would have been privy to the current trend of increases in their AMF. Our organization will promote the “code of ethics” now under development. This code will enable the resorts management to start the much-needed resolution to the current timeshare owner problems.
Many of the owners have not received their 2010 AMF billing as of today. This is another problem that has to be addressed. Most contracts require payment to be in a timely manner, billing also must be in a timely manner. A 30 day billing is unacceptable as many of the owners have multiple units as multiple resorts. Also a short time line leaves little time to resolve disputes or errors in billing. Our goals will address this problem.
We wish all our members and all Sint Maarten Timeshare Owners a very Happy Holidays.
Please feel free to post on this blog, it is for your use, your input is also another way to inform all timeshare owners of your interests.
Rowie Percoco
