Service with a Smile
This issue marks a milestone: Robb Report Vacation Homes will now be a bimonthly, instead of a quarterly, magazine.
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This issue marks a milestone: Robb Report Vacation Homes will now be a bimonthly, instead of a quarterly, magazine—which is tremendously gratifying to all of us here. The support from both the industry and our readers strongly validates our editorial mission. Of course, it hasn’t hurt that we are benefiting from a very robust vacation home market.; function voidFunc() { } voidFunc();)
And as the market expands, so have the choices for vacation
home ownership. A vacation home has, in fact, become the real estate equivalent
of a vacation. In the old scheme of things, you had two choices. You could
either book rooms in a hotel and enjoy all the benefits—room service, maid
service, pools with water slides. Or you owned your own place and pretty much
had to fend for yourself. (Click image to enlarge)
But vacations have become more niche-oriented—family reunion, spa/fitness, learning experience/adventure. It is no longer enough to just go from here to there. Indeed, now that getting from here to there has become so convoluted, you want to feel that by day’s end you have either learned something new (how to cook the perfect risotto while in Tuscany) or perfected a skill (improving your golf swing while at St. Andrews). You want to have an experience; merely getting away to sit on a beach now seems like a colossal waste of time.
The industry has duly taken note of this personal fulfillment phenomenon. Gone are the days of owning a simple cottage in the country or a cabin in the woods. Those modest "cottages" now rival any principal residence in terms of size and amenities. And the logistics involved in making sure that everyone’s vacation experience is fulfilling is now best left to a small army of experts.
You no longer have to stay at a resort to have a staff at your beck and call. You can own a vacation home in a gated community with shared recreational facilities and a communal restaurant or clubhouse; you can own in a development attached to a hotel and enjoy all the resort’s amenities; you can own a fractional-interest mountain condo where your skis are waxed and your boots are warmed; or you can join a private residence club and dip into its pool of high-end villas and apartments around the world. Whatever your ownership preference, you can have meals cooked, tee times readied, kids programs organized. The round-the-clock, in-house services of a concierge, personal trainer/masseuse, housekeeper and cook are not options, they are necessities.
Vacation homes have come a long way. Some of the old-world romance may have gone, but two words will bring us back to reality: burst pipes.
We will be back with an April/May issue filled, as always, with breathtaking communities breaking ground, more fractional-interest options to explore and more gorgeous vacation homes to dream about. The world is your real estate oyster.
editor@vacationhomesmag.com
