Imagine owning a timeshare you don’t want.
You can’t sell it. Nobody will even take it for free. Your maintenance fees keep climbing every year. And you’re told, politely or otherwise, that the obligation could follow you — and eventually your kids — indefinitely.
Now imagine thousands of your fellow owners are in exactly the same position.
Eventually, some of them simply stop paying.
That’s essentially what happened at two sister timeshare resorts in Horseshoe Valley, Ontario, called Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge. What happened next should be studied by every timeshare owner in North America — and I break down the full story on camera, alongside fellow timeshare advocates Irene Parker and John Raymond, in the video below.
Before You Pay Another Maintenance Fee
If you’re considering getting out of your timeshare, I’m offering qualified owners another option. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to an exit company, my document preparation fee will equal one year of your current annual maintenance fee.
You can pay another maintenance fee to remain an owner — or use that same amount toward getting out.
What Actually Happened
That headline is the version that gets repeated. It’s catchy, and it’s not wrong, exactly — but after 25 years in this industry, the last several spent helping owners get out of contracts like these, I’d rather give you the real mechanics, because they’re more interesting than “angry owners forced a shutdown.”
Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge had a business relationship with Wyndham Destinations. But they weren’t Wyndham-owned resorts that Wyndham decided to close. Court records identify the operating entities as the owners’ associations for each property — meaning the resorts were run on behalf of, and financially dependent on, the owners themselves. Wyndham didn’t pull the plug. The owners, through years of mounting financial pressure and an overwhelming vote, did.
That distinction actually makes the story more powerful, not less.
The Trap Nobody Warned Them About
Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge sat just north of Toronto near Horseshoe Valley — together about 250 units, 172 at Carriage Hills and 78 at Carriage Ridge, spread across 20 and 8 acres. Roughly 11,000 people held ownership interests across the two properties.
Many of those owners had bought in decades earlier, under old “in perpetuity” contracts — the kind that never expire and pass on to your heirs whether they want them or not. As those owners aged, or simply stopped traveling, they discovered something timeshare salespeople never mention: there is essentially no functioning resale market for a used timeshare. Owners weren’t just struggling to sell. They were struggling to give the things away.
By 2020, that frustration had gone public. Owners organized their own Facebook group — Wyndham Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge Owners — to compare notes and push for a way out, complaining that Wyndham’s Ovation exit program wasn’t being made available to them. The complaint was consistent: maintenance fees kept rising even as owners who had long since paid off their original purchase price remained stuck paying, year after year, for a product they no longer wanted and couldn’t unload.
The Death Spiral
Here’s the part every timeshare owner should understand, because it applies far beyond Ontario.
A timeshare association has to pay its bills — maintenance, insurance, staff, repairs, reserves — whether every owner pays their share or not. So when owners start defaulting, the shortfall doesn’t disappear. It gets passed on to whoever is left paying.
That’s exactly what happened here. By 2020, roughly a quarter of the association’s roughly 11,000 members were in default. By early 2021, delinquent owners collectively owed close to $24 million — about $16 million from 1,607 Carriage Hills owners and $8 million from 906 Carriage Ridge owners.
Higher deficits mean higher assessments for the owners still paying. Higher assessments push more owners to want out. More owners stop paying. The remaining owners get hit again. It feeds on itself — a genuine financial death spiral, and it’s the same structural weakness sitting underneath a lot of aging timeshare resorts today, not just this one.
Then the Owners Were Finally Asked
This is the heart of the story, and it’s the part I find most remarkable.
During the court-supervised restructuring, the receiver — BDO Canada — surveyed owners at both resorts about whether they actually wanted the timeshare operations to continue.
At Carriage Hills, among owners who voted, only 9.6% wanted to stay. Nearly 63% voted to exit outright, and another 27.6% didn’t vote at all — meaning even counting every non-voter as a “stay,” well over 60% of the membership still wanted out.
At Carriage Ridge, 55% voted to exit, versus 45% who wanted to stay, with roughly a third of that group never having voted either. Combined across both resorts, independent reporting on the survey put the number of participating owners who wanted to remain a timeshare at under 13%.
Think about what that means. A timeshare resort exists because thousands of owners are contractually obligated to keep supporting it. When those same owners were finally given a real, meaningful choice, the overwhelming majority said no more.
BDO concluded the resorts were no longer financially viable. The Ontario Superior Court appointed BDO as receiver effective January 6, 2021, and the process to wind both properties down began.
The Sale Nobody Expected
Here’s where the story gets genuinely surprising.
Once the timeshare structure was stripped away, the underlying real estate turned out to be worth a great deal. BDO marketed the properties and received eight competing offers. The winning bid came from Sunray Group, a hotel and resort operator, for $60 million total.
The court approved the sale, and it closed on June 28, 2021.
Sunray didn’t reopen the properties as timeshares. The timeshare model was finished. Instead, the company began converting the roughly 250 timeshare units — some of them large enough to split — into as many as 500 conventional condominium units. No more shared weeks. No more perpetual maintenance-fee obligations. Just ordinary ownership, the kind most buyers actually understand.
Sit with that contrast for a second. Owners had been complaining they couldn’t even give their timeshare interests away for free. Yet the real estate underneath those same interests sold for $60 million. The timeshare structure itself — not the buildings, not the land — was what had become worthless.
The Payout
Because actual real estate changed hands, real money became available to distribute back to the owners who had been stuck for years. That process took time — sorting out who owned which interval among thousands of members, resolving competing claims, and issuing payments is not simple. BDO issued its Final Distribution Order in February 2024, and wind-up proceedings have continued since, with the receiver’s case still open as recently as this year.
It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t painless. But for owners who had been told for years there was no way out, it was a real resolution — arrived at not through a lawsuit against Wyndham, and not through anger alone, but through owners organizing, refusing to keep propping up an unsustainable structure, and eventually getting a real vote.
What This Means If You’re Stuck Right Now
If you’re sitting on a timeshare you can’t sell, can’t give away, and can’t stop paying for, I want you to take two things from this story.
First: you’re not imagining it. The economics that trapped Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge owners — no resale market, rising fees, “in perpetuity” contracts — are the same economics behind a lot of aging resorts across North America. This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern.
Second: organized, informed owners have more leverage than the industry wants you to believe. Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge didn’t get resolved because one person posted an angry review. It took documentation, persistence, and owners working through legitimate channels. You don’t need thousands of neighbors and a receivership to start — you need to understand your actual options before you spend another year paying for something you don’t want.
That’s exactly what I break down in my guide on what it actually costs to cancel a timeshare — the realistic paths out, what they cost, and what to watch for. It’s the next step I’d point you to after reading this.
I also sat down with Irene Parker and John Raymond to walk through this story in more detail, including a few points that didn’t make it into this article. Watch it below.
You deserve to know your options before you’re trapped for another decade.
Sources: BDO Canada receivership records for Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge; RENX (Real Estate News Exchange); OrilliaMatters; BarrieToday; InnisfilToday. Video referenced: “Wyndham Carriage Hills and Carriage Ridge,” livestreamed September 5, 2021, featuring Wayne C. Robinson, Irene Parker, and John Raymond.