About this archive
Destination Club News covered one narrow corner of luxury travel: clubs that sold members access to a shared portfolio of homes instead of a deed to one of them.
The original site ran from roughly 2009 into 2015. It published short news stories, press releases from the clubs themselves, and a file on each club it followed, split into pages on membership plans, pricing, annual dues, properties, usage rules, holiday access, resignation terms, executives and partnerships. It also kept a glossary of the industry's jargon and a primer on how the model worked.
Its busiest period came in 2010, when Ultimate Escapes, then the second largest club, slid into bankruptcy and several rivals competed for its members. Much of that coverage survives and is collected here.
How this edition was put together
Every page here was recovered from captures in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Text is reproduced as it was published, including dates and bylines. The separate pages of each club file are combined into one page per club, and old addresses point to the new ones, so links from elsewhere on the web still land on the right material.
A few things were removed: newsletter sign-up boxes, the search form, sponsor slots, prompts to request the free guide by email, and contact addresses. Pages that only said content was coming soon were dropped.
The site also ran a discussion forum for members. Those posts were written by private individuals and are not republished.
What is here now
- 158 news stories and press releases
- 70 club files in the directory
- What is a Destination Club
- Destination Club Glossary
- Destination Club Association
- The Ledger, longer pieces written for the archive that read several old reports together
Prices, dues and property lists describe the clubs as they were at the time. Many of these clubs have since closed, merged or changed their terms, so treat the figures as history rather than a quote.