I purchased a timeshare through Grupo Mayan just 3 weeks ago. During the 7 hours sales presentation, the sales people and the managers show you all kinds of numbers about how you can make money, or at least pay-off your purchase, by calling Alliance Integrated Marketing Systems and having them rent out your weeks. In my case for example, I have 1 registered and 1 "vacation fair" week per year at the "Master Room" (also referred to as a "studio"). They told us that we could simply call Allied Integrated Marketing Systems and they would take care of renting our weeks out to someone for $700 per week. After much questioning, they also claimed that they can successfully rent it out at least 88% of the times. Supposedly, this company works with Wyndham to rent out the weeks.
After returning to the US, I called Alliance Integrated Marketing Systems to rent out my 2 weeks (spoke with Mark).
In summary, their story goes as follow:
- They collect all weeks from the individual owners that want to rent out their units and give them to Wyndham.
- They rent out my studio unit for $700 + $419 (maintenance fee) + a few more bucks ($50 or $100) for Wyndham to make their profit.
- These units are successfully rented out 80% - 85% of the times. However, since I'm in the group for the "5,000 contracts", which get priority over the other renters, my changes would be almost 100%.
- They and Wyndham do all the marketing and logistic work for you. You just get the checks in the mail.
- They charge a one-time enrollment fee of $349.
Why I haven't signed up for the service yet:
- Almost everything the Grupo Mayan sales people told me during the sale turned out to be a shameless straight lie. I'm afraid that this may just be another one.
- When questioned, the Alliance Integrated Marketing Systems representative, which was clearly a very clever sales person, could not provide any official statistics of their success rate.
- When questioned, the sales rep could not even show me where or how exactly they market the units.
Is there a web site that I can view your posts??? I don't see your rooms in the big web sites, such as Expedia or Book It. Where are they??? The best answer he could come up with was:
"We send the rooms to several travel agencies."
- Later I found the following web site:
http://www.wyndham.com/hotels/CUNMP/main.wnt
From this web site, I could see that Wyndham is renting my room for about $900 per week.
The following web site rents it for $650 per week:
http://www.funsunmexico.com/
The question:
How is this company is expecting to rent out my room for about $1,200 per week?
Conclusions:
In summary, it looks to me as just another scam to ripoff people that have already been ripped off by the Grupo Mayan. Still, part of me keeps thinking that this may be the only way to minimize my loss (hope never dies...). As a result, I would be very interested to hear from people that paid the $349 enrollment fee and signed up for this service. Do you think it was a good deal, or do you regret it? How effective have they been?
Best regards,
-Gus