Business View Caribbean - November 2015 35
with room for up to eight guests.
“Residences are wholly-owned by individuals,” explains
Spychalla, “there is no shared ownership. Owners can
use their residence personally up to three months a
year, and the rest of the time the hotel ensures that
the unit is in the rental pool and part of the hotel. So,
owners are not allowed to personalize their units – the
hotel décor is the same, throughout. Rental revenue
is split 50/50.” According to Spychalla, the majority of
Valentines’ guests - about 85 percent - come from the
United States, and about 40 percent of that number
are from Florida.
In order to maximize Valentines already healthy occu-
pancy rate, the resort recently joined Preferred Resi-
dences, a worldwide hospitality membership and ex-
change program for luxury shared ownership resorts
and a partner of Interval International. Spychalla ex-
plains the benefits of membership: “It allows our own-
ers to be in an exchange program; they can spend two
or three weeks of their three months in another resort
in the Interval family and there are 5,000 of them,
worldwide. It also brings owners of those properties
to the Bahamas to see what we have, as we still have
some developer units available for sale. Somebody on
an exchange may be a condo owner from Aspen who
comes and stays here and says ‘I like this – I’ll buy one
of the remaining units.’ So, it gives us exposure that
we would not have had, otherwise. We can market our
property to 1.8 million members of Interval’s iPrefer
Loyalty program. So, for a very small fee, it’s a good
way to expose our property.”
Another way in which Spychalla has generated new
revenue has been by reconfiguring the typical Carib-
bean model of closing down a tourist hotel during the
summer “slow” season. “This property no longer clos-
