Wyndham Worldwide is famous for its vacation timeshare units. Recently, USAToday interviewed Steve Holmes—the company’s CEO—regarding how the company was performing during the credit crunch.

At the entry of 2009, Wyndham reduced timeshare sales financing programs due to dried loan pools. The company greatly relies on loans to finance purchases for its vacationers.

Due to the recession, the company laid off around 4,000 employees to reflect its new and reduced goals for the year. And based on statistics, timeshare sales are down by almost 40 percent compared to the same period in 2008.

Despite this, Holmes still approaches the challenges of the recession with a optimistic outlook.

“People continue to buy timeshares and, in a big way, they're continuing to use their timeshares,” says Holmes. “The occupancy [levels] at timeshare resorts were higher than they were last year. There are no hotels that are going to be saying that right now”

When he was asked about the 4,000 layoffs, he said: “Every business felt the pressure of the current macroeconomic environment. None of our businesses were immune to that. It was the constriction of the capital markets that created an environment where we needed to take sales down. When we sell (timeshares), we lend people money 50% of the time to buy them. We then go to insurance companies and banks to lend us money. The fact was that the lenders shut down. And that constricted the amount of capital we had to make available to consumers who we shell timeshares to.”

Source: USAToday