As requested, I've returned to update everyone now that I've gone on a trip subsidized by a timeshare company with the attendant presentation. First of all, big thanks to a user on these forums who got me invited to a BlueGreen presentation/offer. The offer was a 3 night stay at a partner hotel along with $200 in AmEx pre-paid gift cards, for a charge of $199 to BlueGreen and $51 to the area hotel for taxes/resort fees. So, in all, I was out $50 for a 3 night stay in what I would classify as a fine/decent hotel, but nothing luxurious. Definitely cheaper than the rack rate. The presentation was advertised as approximately 2 hours, and my wife and I got out in just under that (about 1 hour and 55 minutes).
The trip was to New Orleans.
And... I bought! Just kidding. Everyone in this thread continually claimed that I "am just the type of person likely to buy" because I expressed interest in seeing the presentation. I did not buy, nor did I find it an especially appealing offer, nor did I find it difficult to say no. The presentation details are likely nothing new to people here, but it was my first one - we started by being assigned a saleswoman and we chatted with her for the first 25-30 minutes. She was very friendly! (I know that's part of the gig). We mostly talked about her recommendations of what to do in the city. Following that, we had a ~45 minute group presentation giving the whole BlueGreen spiel. Then, back to the saleswoman for a resort tour, and finally the financial offers. My wife and I did not go in with a particular strategy to say no, we just had already looked at various numbers and knew that what they offered was not going to be competitive, financially, with the types of vacations we take and pay for out of pocket. The final offer was $1.60 per point for 20,000 points financed at 17.99% with 20% down. I know a lot of this is likely negotiable, but my wife and I simply did the quick back of the napkin math in front of the finance person and said this is like 7k a year for the first decade, with a 7k down payment, and that's just way, way more than we spend on hotels right now.
I understand that there are a lot of other reasons we could have said no (including availability, the fact that the presentation and sales pitch was full of half-truths/un-truths, and re-sale availability), but to be honest I didn't really want to get into the weeds with them. I just said it was more money than we spend on lodging now, and they didn't seem to really have an answer for that. I'm not sure if we had a particularly non-persuasive saleswoman and finance person, but we just said no to each offer after doing the math and we were done. They didn't even send over the closer (he was busy with another couple). Our saleswoman made a half-hearted attempt to pitch us on the closer offer (a "taster" package where we pay $900 for some smaller number of points that can be used within a year). We said no; it was still too expensive and why would we want to go through the trouble of buying points and then booking a hotel when we could just book that same hotel since it was a one-off offer. The saleswoman didn't have much of an answer for that, and they processed us out.
I don't know how these presentations usually go and whether this was representative or not, but to be honest I found it very easy to say no. Unless folks are staying at absolutely bonkers-expensive resorts, the prices we were offered could not even come CLOSE to competitive for what we pay out of pocket. And that's ignoring all the other hassle of a timeshare/being locked in, etc. I understand now why the conventional wisdom is to buy resale at basically $0 or whatever they come out to. And they didn't seem to have much of a response when I simply said it was way more than we usually spend. Maybe there are good answers and we had a novice saleswoman/finance person, or maybe something about our demeanor made them think we weren't going to be convinced so they didn't try, but I would be curious to know if there were some tactics I missed out on.
All in all, I found the presentation interesting and fun, I saved several hundred dollars on our first post-vaccine trip, and I would do it again - but likely at a higher end timeshare company. For our next trip I'll see if I can get to a Marriott one, or something like that. Thanks again to the forum and the users in this thread who gave me advice!
