Seven hundred jobs may be created at new offices in the Mahon area of Cork by one of the world's leading timeshare companies. Planning permission has already been sought.
Resort Condominiums International (RCI) specialises in helping people organise their investment in timeshare properties: planning when they want to go to them and when they wish to exchange them with other like-minded people for a different location anywhere in the world.
The company also organises all travel. It does not sell timeshare properties: it handles the movement of people who own them and who pay a fee to become members of RCI.
The company already has a temporary facility in Cork in the Pouladuff area. Last February, when it began to move its European operation to Cork, RCI said the projection was that 350 jobs would be created within three years. But already 200 people have been employed. According to the company there is every likelihood that the number of jobs may rise to 700 within the next two years. At a time when clouds are gathering over the Apple plant in the city and the future of some 500 jobs there, this is good news for Cork.
The new state-of-the-art Mahon facility will be built on a 100,000 sq ft site. But the planning application in Cork City Hall seeks to double that space.
Company officials in the UK headquarters at Kettering would not say last weekend if even further expansion is planned. But there are reasonable grounds for speculation that, if the space is doubled, the jobs will be, too.
Cork was chosen because of the availability of language and computer graduates. When the company was casting about to find a suitable location to bring all of its European operations together in one place, it found that Cork measured up ideally.
Because its operation is largely computer-driven, it needs excellent telecommunications, and Cork can also provide that. Hence, an investment of some £15.4 million in the new Mahon plant.
Ground-breaking is scheduled for next September.
The graduates who will work there will be required to speak at least two European languages. The reason for this is that when a timeshare owner registered with RCI telephones from Greece or Spain, the person at the other end of the line must be able to converse fluently in those languages.
Callers might wish to forgo their own week or two in a timeshare property and exchange it for time in a similar property elsewhere.
RCI linguists and computer operators are recruited to take the pain out of trying to make such arrangements. More than half of the people working at the Cork facility are Irish.
Calls from all over Europe are now coming through to the switchboards in Cork and being answered in Pouladuff. All queries from RCI members in Germany and France are being handled in Cork.
The transfer of the company's Italian call centre to Cork is well under way, with the Italian-speaking staff at Pouladuff already handling 20 per cent of calls from the 58,000 RCI members there.
The Spanish call centre will be the next to move to Cork, followed next year by those in Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Finland and Denmark.
Ultimately the Cork plant will become a mini-United Nations with operators speaking in many tongues.
RCI handles exchanges in more than 3,200 resort properties throughout the world. More than 2.4 million people are part of its exchange club, and there has been a 15 per cent growth in business in recent years.
The timeshare concept had a bad reputation in the past. Legislation now offers much greater protection, and the arrival in the timeshare market of major companies such as Thomas Cook means that a new era is dawning with Cork at the heart of it.