As the destination club industry consolidates, Ultimate Resort is buying most of the assets of Tanner & Haley, which filed for Chapter 11 about 4 months ago.

This is good news for the whole destination club sector and a tidy end to the bankruptcy filing. Tanner & Haley started the whole sector when they were launched in the late 1990s by Rob McGrath.

T&H members should be pleased that their club properties will keep going and that they will be offered membership in Ultimate Resort on special terms. The newly enlarged Ultimate Resort will be the second largest destination club behind Exclusive Resorts.

Many of T&H's errors came out in the bankruptcy court filings, these include:

• 100% membership refunds,
• leasing too many homes rather than buying them,
• paying short term rental fees to accommodate members at peak vacation times.

Other clubs are already learning from these errors and have started to improve their financial transparency and the good clubs are all having independent audits. This all helps to make their members much more comfortable about the investments that they have made.

This story was also reported in the Wall St Journal