Holiday Inn Club Vacations Timeshares Heads West

The three-year-old partnership between IHG and Orange Lake Resorts has announced the purchase of an additional resort by Orange Lake in Las Vegas, which will become part of Holiday Inn Club Vacations

The 648-unit Las Vegas Desert Club near the Strip is the newest property in the Orange Lake Resorts portfolio, and is the most significant element of the transaction. The one- and two-bedroom property just a block from the Strip adds a western outpost to complement Orange Lake’s portfolio of six locations in the East that span from Vermont to Wisconsin to Florida, as well as Tennessee and South Carolina. Orange Lake will complete an ongoing renovation of the property, and it should join the Holiday Inn Club Vacations roster sometime in 2012.

“Our alliance with Orange Lake has been so successful it showed us we’re strong enough to add ancillary businesses to our core hotel model without distracting from our core mission while producing accretive value for IHG and our partners,” says Del Ross, vice president, U.S. sales and marketing for IHG. “It wet our appetite for other alliances and we have since launched the InterContinental Alliance Resort program.”

“This is a huge step for us,” says Orange Lake President & CEO Don Harrill of the Las Vegas acquisition. “I liken it to five or six years ago when we were a single-site resort in Orlando and began to build a network of resorts around this hub to satisfy our customer base in the East. And now that we’ve established a beachhead in Las Vegas, we can evolve our product offerings and build our membership in the West.”

Harrill says the company will look for other opportunities in the West with targets including San Diego, Phoenix, San Francisco and Hawaii. “We plan to be opportunistic in our growth strategy,” he says. “While acquisitions are typically more cost effective in this environment, we don’t rule out new development in the right situations.”

The independent timeshare giant Orange Lake Resorts and brand company InterContinental Hotels Group joined in a partnership in January, 2009, an alliance that marries Orange Lake’s vacation ownership expertise with the brand recognition of Holiday Inn Club Vacations and the marketing muscle of IHG.

Last fall IHG and Orange Lake announced a rebranding of existing and new Orange Lake resorts under the Holiday Inn name. The common link is a strong one: both Holiday Inns and Orange Lake were founded by entrepreneur Kemmons Wilson, and the Wilson family still owns and operates the timeshare company, Holiday Inn Club Vacations explained in a press release.

Photo Credit: lhonline.com
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