We just returned from Kauai Beach Villas, and at check-in we discovered that currently, the only way to (legally) use the
hotel swimming pool on the same property is to attend a sales presentation and receive "golden" arm bands. Yes - it really is gold! We also receive a $100 AMEX gift card.
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I have to admit, I was also curious to see what the Wyndham sales presentations sounded like these days.
-The "concierge" at the KBV office told us the "owner's update" would only be 45 min.
-On the form we had to sign for the presentation, she wrote 60 min.
-The presentation was actually 90 min.
The presentation was at the Bali Hai resort in Princeville, which is lovely, but it's in-land and it "feels" like a densely populated condo property - not a Hawaii resort.
Some amusing highlights:
We presented ourselves as low income retirees who didn't know much about timesharing and stated upfront that we were there to sell back some of our timeshares to Wyndham, because we were struggling to pay the MF's since retiring. We repeated this half a dozen times, and asked each new sales person if Wyndham would buy them back. I didn't admit that I knew anything about timeshares.
We saw 3 people:
-Our sales person - probably newish on the job.
-Her supervisor - had been in the business for years - had a lot of forced "Rah Rah" including awkward touching, high fiving, and loud exclamations of "BOOM!" after he made a point.
-The closer - an elderly lady who offered us a trial pkg. and lead us to the gift desk in 10 min. She also gave kind advice about how to rent our timeshares to cover our maintenance fees.
First there was a rather long presentation about the close relationship between Wyndham and Pahio and how the original developer carefully hand picked Wyndham to hand his precious resorts over to.
Then there was a rather confusing review of all the Wyndham benefits. Even as someone who is familier with timeshares, this was confusing to me, and I'm not sure if the sales person was just not very good, or if they were trying to baffle us with BS.
Then her supervisor came in with copies of our deed info and stated that only 6 of our 7 weeks were eligible for Wyndham, because we only bought 6 of the 7 deeds directly from Pahio. (Actually, we bought all of them on the resale market for pennies on the dollar, or free.)
He also congratulated us with great (fake) enthusiasm for owning timeshares worth over $400K. (While at the same time stating that they had absolutely no interest in buying back any of our valuable weeks! Which we knew, of course.) With great joy he informed us that this qualified us for the highest elite status with Wyndham, which every Wyndham owner coveted, and gushed about our good fortune.
I didn't write numbers down, but to convert all 6 deeds to [Wyndham] points they wanted us to buy a Bali Hai deed for about $22K. They told us this was an extra special deal available on a foreclosure, that only was available that day and not to tell anyone. Plus a conversion fee of about $1,500 per week. (And I think there was one other fee?)
They
GUARANTEED that -
-We would have the exact same ability to make home resort reservations at KBV at 16 mos. (not true)
-We would
always have first choice of RCI exchanges before other RCI members.
-We would
always be able to make Wyndham reservations for 50% of the required points.
-We would
always be upgraded.
I actually reviewed these promises with them (knowing they were untrue) to see if they would double down on them, and they did.
After we clearly stated that we couldn't afford to take on anything else, and actually wanted to down-size, they briefly offered us a much smaller pkg., and then a trial pkg., which we also refused.
Overall, as presentations go, it wasn't bad. They were not rude or unprofessional, although, they lied, of course.
