The High Court in London, UK, is to consider a class action lawsuit that alleges members of a worldwide timeshare exchange club suffered detriment over improper â skimming offâ of premium timeshare properties.

The case, set for Monday 9 May, concerns premium timeshare properties from the exchange pool by the exchange club operator, RCI Europe, part of the US hotel group Wyndham Worldwide.

The claim is a class action lawsuit with a total of 487 claimants in the class represented by law firm Edwin Coe LLP and the forthcoming hearing is a test case of four members of the class. A further 9,000 members of a UK timeshare action group may potentially be affected by the judgment, says the law firm.

The case concerns claims of around £2.4million in damages from RCI Europe, based in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

RCI denies it has breached the trust placed in it by its members and claims that all members are told that there is no guarantee that requested timeshares will be available. It claims some properties are offered to rent only by RCI and that this income helps RCI to invest in additional properties which it adds to the pool.

It claims the only reason potential exchangers may not be able to find properties to use is because their property is not valued as highly as the one they seek to use, or that it is a property for rental only.

Two class action suits have been filed against RCI in the US over the conduct of its exchange pool. One is on-going and one settled recently, which concerned the transparency of its points based system and property evaluation methods rather than a skimming off argument, says Edwin Coe.

Some of the UK claimants say they only purchased their timeshare property with the express purpose of entering the exchange scheme and have found it failed to live up to promises.

Solicitor to the RCI Class Action, David Greene, of Edwin Coe LLP, says, â All timeshare owners want when entering an exchange system is a simple, transparent and effective way of swapping their right to use a property for the right to holiday at another residence of similar quality, within a reasonable timeframe.

RCI, despite boasts of its large property exchange pool, seems to consistently thwart this reasonable expectation. Too many members too often have been told that not only can they not exchange their own property for one of their choice, at a time of their choosing, but that no properties of equal value exist anywhere within RCI’s extensive pool for members reasonably to exercise their right to exchange.

We intend to expose these unfair practices at trial, and expect to succeed in securing rightful compensation for thousands of frustrated holiday-makers. This case may provoke a long-overdue shake up in the opaque world of timeshare exchange companies.

The test claimants claim that RCI is skimming off the best timeshares by selling them, despite having said they would make them available for exchange. Claimants say they were rarely able to exchange their right to use a holiday property for an alternative holiday property in a different location of the same value .

This failure to effect reasonable exchanges is alleged to have amounted to prejudicial conduct by RCI against the interests of the exchange club members, who expected RCI to operate as a mutual.

RCIâ s duty to its members was in clear conflict with its own interests in profiting from the skimming off of the most desirable properties and for staff incentives, and was undertaken without members consent, it is claimed, and RCI breached the implied fiduciary duty of care to its club members.

One claimant, Jenni Kravitz, says that despite making a reservation request early in the year for a holiday one Christmas, RCI informed her there were no properties available, let alone of comparable quality. Another year, she sought to affect an exchange but was told it was  too late and that she should have tried booking more than a year before.

Once the RCI exchange system was put on the internet (in 2008) to allow club members direct access, the results did not improve for the claimants. Eventually she returned her timeshare to Wimpen Leisure in 2012.

Only after solicitors wrote to RCI did Ms Kravitz find out that one reason for this failure to provide alternative exchange properties, the claimants allege, is because the best properties in the pool were in fact â skimmed offâ by RCI, i.e. rented out to others with the rental funds received for the commercial benefit of RCI, rather than being made available to the exchange club members.

In February 2011 the Timeshare, Holiday Products, Resale and Exchanges Contracts Regulations 2010/2960 came into force, requiring amongst other matters, that the trader must give the consumer information about the rights acquired include an explanation of how the exchange system works.

The claimants also claim the contract between RCI and the timeshare owners is unfair, as set out in the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.

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