Low Seasons Holidays? Complaints, high-pressure sales and timeshare disputes explained

Accusations of unfair or even unlawful behaviour in the timeshare industry are nothing new. So why are Seasons Holidays complaints attracting so much attention?

Seasons Holidays PLC: background and profile

Companies House, however, shows the company was incorporated 13 years later, in 1996. Seasons promotes resort locations across the UK as well as Spain and the Canary Islands, and claims to have facilitated “holiday experiences” for more than two million members.

The company is owned by Barry and Sharon Hurley (also known as Sharon Kinsella). Seasons self-reports a 90% customer satisfaction rating and says its operations have expanded by over 30% in the last five years.

From the Seasons Holidays website alone, you could easily conclude this is a successful timeshare business with a happy membership.

But reports from Seasons owners to European Consumer Claims (ECC), posts on consumer sites, and Facebook member groups suggest a very different story…

Slaley Hall “subterfuge” claims

Slaley Hall, a luxury Seasons property in Northumbria, was once seen as having something rare in timeshare: a satisfied and loyal owner base.

Members believed their 99-year lodge contracts represented excellent value, with maintenance fees far below the cost of comparable accommodation. Those original memberships were with Q Hotels, but in 2019 Seasons Holidays took over Slaley Hall.

In 2020, at the height of COVID—when UK holidays were in exceptional demand—long-standing Slaley Hall members, initially represented by Tim and Fiona Norman, went public. They described what they believed was the start of a campaign of harassment by Seasons.

The company was widely reported to have pressured Mr and Mrs Norman, along with other members, to rescind their memberships—and even pay Seasons £15,000 for the privilege. Tim, a hotelier, believed Seasons wanted existing owners out so the lodges could be rented at higher rates than the current maintenance fees allowed.

“UK holiday accommodation is at a premium now,” explained Tim at the time. “Seasons probably want us gone so they can rent out our lodges for high prices. They are bombarding all the owners with what can only be described as bullying phone calls trying to take our memberships back.”

The owners resisted for as long as they could, and their concerns were sympathetically reported in the media. Ultimately, after what was described as a campaign of dirty tricks, Seasons sold the properties out from under the furious owners. A look at the Slaley Hall Lodge Owners Facebook group gives a sense of the prolonged dispute between members and Barry/Sharon Hurley.

Sales and finance allegations

In 2021, Seasons made the media again after a couple from Stirlingshire complained that they had been “railroaded” into taking £21,000 of finance to buy a timeshare they say they were only able to use once. The Ashbys later lost their house after Joe (an engineer at Switzerland’s CERN Large Hadron Collider facility) was laid off and they could no longer keep up with payments for a loan they say should never have been granted.

The couple said they had initially “won” a “free holiday” from Seasons, but only on the condition they attended a timeshare sales presentation during their stay. After what they described as “real high pressure sales” they signed up to a membership and were then upgraded on their first timeshare holiday, at Club Tahiti in Lanzarote.

The couple said they believed they should not have qualified for finance because Joe had already been made redundant. However, they claim the sales representative said that despite this, he would be able to “find a way” to get the loan approved.

Linda was struggling with mental health issues at the time, but the couple say this did not deter the Seasons representative, who advised them to apply for the loan in Linda’s name rather than Joe’s. “We felt like we were talked into a corner. We had said we loved it and would buy if we could get finance (thinking we never could because of my redundancy and Linda’s health problems). Then suddenly we were in the position of having to go ahead. Foolishly we did,” said Joe at the time. The couple defaulted on payments and lost the membership, but say they were still left with the full debt to repay.

The Ashbys’ case was picked up by the media and Seasons ultimately reached an undisclosed agreement with them.

But was their experience a one-off—or do Seasons Holidays timeshare reviews and complaints point to a wider pattern?

Media and consumer organisation scrutiny

In 2020, Seasons attempted to renege on promises made to long-standing members Wendy and Andrew Wilkinson about access to leisure facilities at Clowance Estate & Country Club.

The couple paid £25,000 for a one-week-per-year studio ownership back in 1990—far above the going rate for comparable timeshare memberships. “The appeal to us was that all of our family were allowed to use the leisure facilities all year round, as we lived a couple of hundred metres from Clowance. We never use our accommodation week, which is of little interest to us,” explained shop owner Andrew.

The Wilkinsons contacted various consumer organisations for help after they claim Seasons tried to cancel their family access to the facilities.

After a wave of negative publicity, Seasons reinstated the promised family access at Clowance.

In 2021 the company faced further criticism over alleged financial mis-steps, including the filing of corporate accounts at Companies House. Questions were also raised about why annual maintenance fees were being paid into a Seasons bank account rather than the Owners Club account.

Questions were asked about whether accounts were not filed due to cashflow issues or simple complacency. If it was just the latter, Slaley Hall lodge member “Christopher” noted on Facebook that late filing could incur a fine of between £750 and £1,500—an irresponsible use of members’ maintenance fee money.

The most serious current concern involves high-level consumer organisation, media and legal interest in allegations that sales staff have been presenting Fractional Timeshare memberships as a financial investment—an issue at the centre of what some describe as a Seasons Holidays PLC investigation.

“We await the outcome of these investigations with concern,” says Greg Wilson, CEO of ECC.

“If true, it would be an unacceptable breach of consumer law and could have serious consequences for Seasons Holidays. There are very good legal reasons why any kind of timeshare is prohibited from being sold as a financial investment.

“The natural consumer assumption is to regard timeshare as a form of property, and property always seems to go up in value,” continues Wilson.

“In reality, normal timeshares lose substantively all their financial value the moment they are bought. A buyer may pay tens of thousands of pounds for a membership and immediately be unable even to give it away for free, even if they haven’t used it.

“Fractional ownerships purport to give part-ownership of a property to the buyer, furthering the illusion of investment. Sometimes this is real and sometimes it isn’t. In any case, even fractional owners have very little chance of regaining any money on their purchase. This is why the law is so clear that no form of timeshare may be sold as a financial investment.”

Help at hand

If you feel you have been treated unfairly by Seasons Holidays in any way, please get in touch with our team at Timeshare Advice Centre.

We can help.