Keith Trowbridge: The Passing of a True Timeshare Pioneer

Today, if you want to learn about technology, working for Microsoft or Apple would be a dream job. But in the early 1980s, working for Captran Resorts in Southwest Florida was your ticket to future timeshare employment.

By 1974, Canadian-born Keith W. Trowbridge, Ph.D. was selling his Captran properties “by the slice” with a logo that resembled a pie-shaped slice of a pizza. He had developed the 31-unit Sanibel Beach Club, recognized as the first purpose-built timeshare resort in North America on exclusive Sanibel Island. There had been around 45 conversion resorts, but this was the first building designed and built specifically for the purpose of use as a timeshare resort. The resort was sold out in 18 months. A marble and bronze plaque remains on the property today to indicate this distinction.

Media Darling In those days, technology was light-years away. Hardly anyone had a computer; cell phones were rare. The news was transmitted via three primary television networks, newspapers, and magazines. But the hottest new concept during that time was timesharing, also called interval ownership. Every consumer, business, real estate, and travel magazine wanted to print its own story on the new phenomenon as timesharing became the “darling” of the media.

Keith was one of the first developers to embrace the use of the media to help sell the little-known or understood product. As the Captran PR chief, one of my jobs was to set up interviews with Keith and work with journalists who contacted us, explaining every facet of the “interval ownership” concept. This included how it was conceived, how fixed weeks worked, what it cost, why we gave away gifts for sales tours, why annual maintenance fees were charged, how owners could enjoy exchange vacations, and why ownership made sense for vacationing families.

During my three years with Captran, I spoke to the media just about every day, and at Keith’s suggestion, shared every detail about how timesharing worked. There were no “secrets.” Keith also shared floor plans, sales material, price sheets, and condominium documents with new timeshare developers. His thinking at the time was “If one of us succeeds, we all will.” Keith appeared on the Today show and other TV mediums. Positive articles ultimately appeared in just about every major daily newspaper and consumer publication in the United States and Canada, helping to spread the word about the then-new industry.

Resort Industry Firsts

Since timesharing was essentially a new real estate product and considered a condominium under Florida law, documents had to be written so owners would understand their rights of usage. At the time, Keith later said he had no idea if the concept would work or even if it would exist a few years down the road. He hired a Miami attorney named Tom Davis, one of the founders of Interval International, to write the condo docs and include a stipulation for future use. They estimated that the lifespan of our building would be 40 years.

There were other “firsts” as Captran completed $50 million annually in timeshare sales, despite a credit crunch and oil embargo that triggered a gasoline shortage halting travel throughout the country. But being first wasn’t always the ideal situation. As Keith often commented, “You can always tell the pioneers: they’re the guys with arrows in their backs.”

Captran was the first to have OPC agents in 1974. For the handsome fee of $2 per tour (including premium) Keith’s sons – Michael, and David – still in the industry today – would regularly generate 20 to 30 tours each day using seashells placed in a zip-lock baggie as a “little piece of Sanibel” to take home as their only gift. Captran resorts were some of the first to be included in an early RCI exchange directory and had the first celebrity endorsement with TV/movie star Dick Van Patten. They were the first to obtain a consumer loan from GE Credit, as each resort opened with its own rental and onsite resale associate. Keith authored the first book on timesharing, published by Simon & Schuster in 1981, selling 50,000 copies … before Amazon existed. (TIME TO SHARE: The adventurous life of “The Father of Timeshare” and how he started a global real estate revolution)

By the time Keith had developed his third property, fellow developers were beating down his doors to see how it was done. He later franchised his resorts to Canada and the Caribbean, selling at some of the early properties for less than $2,000 a week. From the beginning, Keith Trowbridge thought the concept through from start to finish and always approached it as a total concept – sales, management, rentals, and even resales. Before the company closed in 1984 and its interests sold to Captran alumni Kenn Keim (now deceased) and RDI – later sold to Bluegreen – there were 35 resorts flying the Captran banner. In later years, Keith operated Executive Quest, Inc., an executive search company for the timeshare industry.

“It was the early pioneers like Keith Trowbridge,” says friend Dick Ragatz, “who really ‘invented’ today’s multi-billion-dollar industry. They should not be forgotten but remembered for their foresight, visionary skills and deep belief in their product, and the great risks they all took. While the industry is also indebted to the hoteliers who ultimately joined our ranks, they didn’t really create the product or stick their necks out to make payroll when sales were slow. It was the early pioneers like Keith who truly paved the way to the industry we know today.”

Today’s timeshare kingdom is filled with developers, sales, marketing, and property management executives from Canada to the Canary Islands who began their timeshare journey with Keith. Many of these professionals owe the success of their business to the visionary ideas implemented by Keith.

Keith passed away on 9/11 at the age of 83, leaving his own unique imprint on the industry he helped invent, with many of his early ideas and concepts are deeply woven into the tapestry of today’s vacation ownership programs. He was a trailblazer who courageously traversed virgin territory, clearing new pathways and leading the way for others to follow.