Very few salespeople in the other aspects of our lives find it necessary to resort to the sales tactics commonly used by the Wyndham salespeople. And by other timeshare group's salespeople too.
There are some excellent reasons to own a timeshare. You're correct in saying that sometimes there's no need for the timeshare salesperson to convince the person to buy. It's just working out what they'll buy and the price. It sure makes the timeshare salesperson's day or more likely week when they get a sale like that.
Timeshares used to have a bad rep, a lot of it deserved, but have come a long way in 35-40+ years. What hasn't changed are the sales practices. It's harder than ever now for the salespeople with all the information available on the internet about the different timeshares, buying resale and with younger people being very internet oriented.
As willing participants in the purchasing process, we were fortunate to have good salespeople who amazingly enough were always able to find inventory that didn’t exceed our established budget and got us to the level of membership we desired…oftentimes with freebies included. We knew that if they couldn’t do it that time, there would always be other opportunities for a reasonable acquisition. We recently added our children to our membership. One knows very well how to use the program as he has been with us almost every step of the way since we started with Vacation Break then Fairfield and now Wyndham, since he was a mere tot, vacationing and sitting thru sales presentations (that’s probably why they didn’t keep us longer than 60 minutes). The other will have to play catch up with the leaning curve. One has young children, the other hasn’t even started yet. We are looking forward to seeing our children create memories for our grandchildren and hopefully future grandchildren as we have for them. Many see time share sales as a negative. It’s no worse than buying a car. All are things we can live without but for those of us that have chosen to have it as part of our lifestyle, it’s great! I’m often asked why we don’t just buy a vacation home instead? That would relegate us to going to the same place every vacation. Even vacation homes have expenses and maintenance. We even looked at condos in Hawaii. Folks complain about maintenance fees on timeshare. They haven’t seen the maintenance fees on a tiny $500k condo in Honolulu. They start at around $750 a month! Kind of expensive for a piece of real estate you might visit a couple times a year.
Sales presentations are usually given to people who are staying at the facility. It couldn’t be that bad if they’re there. Sadly many people are willing to get in-over their heads when purchasing anything on impulse without giving any thought as to how they plan to pay for it. I guess you could fault the salespeople for taking advantage of that but, bottom line, people are responsible for managing their own finances.
