Do you want a better class of holiday? (Time-Share Holiday Brokers in general)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	Time-Share Holiday Brokers in general
Date:	18/09/01 (721 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some good points

Disadvantages: This is a total scam

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus Part Two -

A couple of days ago the Odd Couple known as dave27 and Mrs D kicked off a Battle of Sexes by writing and posting their differing opinions on shopping at Evans. That little exercise was so successful (Sez who? - Ed.) that we thought we'd try it again and now our jaundiced gaze alights upon the subject of the Timeshare Holiday, variously considered either the route to very cheap but high class holidays for the rest of your life, or alternatively the Hard Sell Exercise from Hades. Hold on to your Flat Cap or your Easter Bonnet, and away we go.....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I knew there was trouble a-brewing as soon as Mrs D took the telephone call: "Hello, is the lady (!) of the house there, we want to make you the offer of a lifetime..."

"Is this timeshare?"

"No, certainly lot, we want to give you a different sort of experience, one that will set you up for life, one that will change the way you take holidays forever..."

Yeah, right...

We'd heard it all before, a thousand times, but this guy assured us that they were not like the rest, that we would definitely receive an unconditional holiday AND a weekend break PLUS a three course dinner for two just for coming along to a presentation and listening to what they had to say.

Now, the dave27 clan are quite street wise and we'd experienced the hard sell timeshare sales pitch several times back in the 80's and early 90's when we were in holiday in Malta, Portugal and Tenerife, so we were well wise to the tricks of these charlatans ... you know the ones I mean, where they drag you off the street, promise you a wonderful gift and spirit you away to the mountains for a couple of hours while their hard nosed sales pitch goes into overdrive, screaming about the benefits and wonderful opportunities, but that you had to decide there and then or miss out on the ch
ance of a lifetime.

We'd resisted back then and would resist again, no one was going to beat us and the extras this time sounded quite intriguing, so we thought, "Well, what have we actually got to lose?"

Mrs D was steadfast, she wanted a cheap holiday and was prepared to do anything to get it and nagged me for about a week to take a day off, so that we could attend and in the end I relented, against my better judgement, anything for a quiet life, and booked a day's leave to brave the fearsome challenge of THE TIMESHARE SALESMAN...

On Thursday, September 13, after dropping the dave27-ettes off at school, we set off for our date with destiny, somewhere in the wilds of Cockerham, near Lancaster, at a place called the Thurnham Country and Leisure Club.

After handing over our introductory letter, we were ushered out of the lounge for the short drive up the road to the local Village Hall where, along with another hapless couple, we were paired off with our Host for the Day, one Frank Del Pinto, a crew cutted fat boy of Italian extraction, who assured us that he was just a simple soul, that it made no difference to him whether we bought or not, that he just wanted to give his pitch, that there would be no hard sell, that if we had any questions we could ask the other supervisors behind us as he didn't know all the answers.

Me and Mrs D knew our parts and were all ready to play the little game. She was the keen and enthusiastic holiday lover and I was the cynical, hard bitten accountant who wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else where he didn't have to listen to this little spiel. Franky Boy obviously sussed that he had to play to the Female of the House and get her to win her boring husband round because he started working her and sitting side on to me.

He told us the premise of their offer. They were offering us the chance of buying in to the Thurnham Leisure Group, by buying the lease
hold of a room for up to six people in any one of their three country clubs in Cockerham, Eastbourne or Norfolk, that we would be able to get cheap nightly stays at any of their residences, that we could make free use of their leisure facilities any day we wanted, that we could exchange our week every year for £118 and stay in Switzerland, Brazil, Orlando, Germany, wherever in the world that we wanted, that we could sell the timeshare whenever we wanted, that we would own the lease for 68 years and at the end of a ten year period paying £200 a month, we would then have free holidays for the rest of our lives AND that we could bequeath the lease on to the dave27-ettes when we snuffed it ... how could we possibly refuse?

By now we were about 90 minutes into a two and a half hour process which was obviously well thought out and designed around the AIDA model of selling (Awareness-Interest {not too sure about this one, could be Intent, but who cares, you get the picture}-Desire {or possibly Decision, but again who cares?}-Action), and involved a lot of steady momentum being built up and psychological push, and BOREDOM had descended upon Mrs D - she'd had enough and it was starting to show...

When Frank brought out the RCI brochure, it was the last straw. RCI is a global organisation that arranges the exchange and upgrading of timeshare accommodation, all for a small fee, you understand, and they are behind a lot of these timeshare operations. For £118, you can swap your week in Sunny Cockerham for a glorious, sun drenched holiday of a lifetime in Florida. Now, Mrs D was getting well narked and had just switched off. I had to keep this exercise going in order for us to get our free gifts, so I started sitting up and taking notice, conning Frank into thinking that I was getting interested. He fell for it, and you could see the position of his chair change as he swung towards me, giving me the face on sincere act, and freezing out Mrs D. In fact
, so convincing was my approach that I felt Mrs D kick me several times under the table because she thought I was getting ready to wave the cheque book.

We'd already asked several times what the cost of this offer was and Frank kept saying, "Wait until the end, until we know it's right for you."

But now he had sussed we weren't taking things serious and started getting a bit curt and cut things short, leading us out and saying that the free holiday was a crap package holiday but we'd probably enjoy it and that we couldn't possibly have afforded their deal, that he was "their best closer in Europe and cleared 82 grand last year". True colours or what! A week in their little scheme each year would have cost us £25,000, but we already knew that.

By now it was too late to take the free lunch, because we had to pick the dave27-ettes up, the holiday had all sorts of exclusions and conditions attached to it and was more trouble than it was worth and yet another "offer of a lifetime" had been boiled down to the same old scam. We weren't surprised or even particularly annoyed because we knew what to expect, but I guess many less experienced couples could have been heartbroken or, worse still, have fallen for their scheme. The other couple who were there, about ten years older than us were still there when we left, so they may have been caught.

Really, all of this is pretty damn indicative of the general nature of these things. They aren't cheap, they are aggressively and expertly sold and the salesmen can be spiteful. DO NOT BE FOOLED.

A couple of days later, I was discussing the matter on the Ciao UK Yahoo Groups Chat facility with Connoisseur Haggler and she told me that she and her husband got conned into buying a week's timeshare on a houseboat, that she wasn't able to sell it, that they had to pay £250 maintenance a year and they were neither using the ho
liday nor exchanging it and regretted the whole sordid affair, so please be warned.

The Thurnham Leisure option was probably better than a lot of the other variations we'd seen and had some neat add on touches, such as membership of a special cut price travel agency which would have given us all sorts of advantages, and there was less chance of a foreign organisation cutting and running with unfinished complexes left behind them, but at heart it was just the same old scam. If you never believe anything else that dave27 ever tells you, trust him on this one - TIMESHARE IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER CON WHICH YOU WILL REGRET FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES. DO NOT FALL FOR IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Now assuming you're not completely bored out of your skull by the subject, why not track down member jackie27 and catch Mrs D's sterling writings on this subject and see which of these ops is the more interesting and useful one...

Summary: