Timesharing on St. Maarten

Timeshare St. Maarten

The first timeshare hotel, I won’t even say resort, on St. Maarten was the Sea Palace Hotel in the Dutch Side Capital of Philipsburg. Timeshares are only sold on the Dutch Side as the French evolved so many sales restrictive rules for the industry that it made no sense for any developers to invest in building a timeshare resort on the French Side.

The Sea Palace was pretty much sold out before the major St. Maarten, purpose-built, timeshares came into being and Philipsburg ceased to be the place to stay on vacation. The places to stay on St. Maarten became Simpson Bay, Maho Beach and Mullet Bay.

The first major resort to be built for timeshare was Pelican Resort and Casino in Simpson Bay. It began with a very small building called the Dieffenbachia with only a few units to become, at one time, the most successful timeshare resort in the world by volume of sales with hundreds of units from studios to 3 bedrooms. Pelican’s newest buildings under its original ownership were the Flamingo and the Royal Palm Beach which were sold to Sunterra Resorts in the early 90’s. The Atrium Resort (now owned by Festiva Resorts) was purchased by Pelican as it had been an abandoned, nearly complete construction so what now are 4 independent timeshare resorts were all built by Pelican.

Following Pelican came Divi Little Bay, Maho Beach Resort and Mullet Bay’s Towers and shortly afterwards the Sapphire Club, Belair and much later on Caravanserai (originally marketed as Club Mundi), La Vista, Oyster Bay Beach Resort and the newest being Westin but the timeshare operation at the hotel is not strictly owned by Westin. Port de Plaisance also entered the timeshare arena but its efforts were short lived. No beach and a trek to the units being two contributing factors.

Hope I didn’t leave anybody out.