"Best" Timeshare Sales Pitch

[dougrm3]

My wife and I sat through a time share presentation down in Williamsburg. Our 90 minutes didn’t go for 4 hours but it went for almost 2. The meal was poor. No coffee and runny eggs. The sales person wanted to “buy” our time shares and have us join a Sunterra vacation club. I told him we were happy with week 27 at the outer banks and week 52 at Mountainside Villas for skiing. We told him we had no problem exchanging with RCI. He told me that RCI was horrible and soon we would not be able to get good exchanges. I asked him what RCI would say about his statements. We were there through a RCI exchange. His “manager” said the sales person was new and didn’t know what he was saying. The gift was a free pass for two adults to Williamsburg for the week.

Next time (If we decide to endure it) I would ask for the gift before the presentation, Set my watch for 90 minutes and let them know that the phone person said they only wanted our opinion and we were not perspective buyers.

Doug

 

[Kona Lovers]

Our worst one was in Dec. of 2004 at the Marriott in Palm Springs, CA. We began with a tour of the spacious lobby with a bunch of pictures of Marriott himself, then on upstairs to little cubicles where the reps did their thing. We were given the cost mullarky of the lifetime savings of owning rather than renting. His biggest thing he kept coming back to was to "own California property, but trade for Hawaii". He mentioned that was what the vast majority of their owners did. He also mentioned often that you could trade for a "nominal fee of $79 within Marriott. As time went on and I asked the sense of why Marriott had a fee for internal exchanges, he sited their need for a healthy bottom line, to which I replied that I could care less about Marriott's corporate earnings, and it went downhill from there. We got our gift and left, laughing as we drove out of the parking lot, as we had purchased an annual week in Kona off of eBay months before at a fraction of Marriott's prices.