Wyndham Vacation Opens New Royal Garden Timeshare Unit in Waikiki

Waikiki was just flooded with 140 new timeshare units, as Wyndham Vacation Ownership opened the 140-unit property at 440 Olohana St., between Kuhio Avenue and the Ala Wai Canal, to its time-share customers last week, and plans to begin sales of time-share interests at the Royal Garden within the next month.

This will be the final stage of the original 4-year plan to convert the former Royal Garden at Waikiki hotel into a full-blown timeshare unit. This conversion, along with other related conversions of other hotels (331-unit Hilton Grand Waikikian, which opened in late 2008, and 195 units at Wyndham’s Waikiki Beach Walk property that opened in 2006), were all made because of the recession.

It seems that these hotel giants were unable to stay afloat because of the economy, so instead of shutting down completely, the transitions to timeshares were made. The transition has been pretty successful, so much so the Hilton is following in the footsteps of Wyndham, proposing a deal to build two more towers with about 500 time-share units on its Waikiki property.

Hilton also bought the shuttered Ohana Islander Waikiki Hotel earlier this year and plans to convert the tower’s 143 one-bedroom suites to timeshares by 2013. It seems that this is the new big thing in Waikiki, as there are going to be thousands of these timeshare units available from multiple companies in the near future.

It also seems that the idea to turn all of these hotels into timeshare units is a successful one. Wyndham spent $54 million converting the 195-unit Ohana Reef Towers hotel at Waikiki Beach Walk into timeshares. That project is nearly sold out so the idea to build and convert more hotels was an easy one.

According to property records, Wyndham paid $43 million to acquire the Royal Garden from private investment firm Jupiter Holdings Group.