RUN from the timeshare trap!
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 7/28/10
I know this is long, but it is worth reading so that you don’t waste your time or money.
Grandview gave me the worst experience of my life while I was on vacation. My husband, a couple friends, and I were staying at the Luxor and they conned us into going to a presentation for some show tickets and gaming money. I must say that the show and gaming money was NOT worth the aggrevation.
First, the presentor tells you that this is a no pressure sales pitch which couldn’t be farther from the truth. He refused to tell us how much the units cost until he finished his sales pitch and showed us a unit. The units are nice but it is not worth it. He tried to tell us that if we don’t want the unit after we buy that we can just sell it and get all of our money back. I told him that he can’t guarantee that since he can’t control the market. He got upset and started to get snippy. He said that he knows I’m more intelligent than that and tried to show me some graph that he was drawing to show how the housing market never goes all the way down. (Yeah, right).
Once he finally told us the price, $19,990, we told him that we were not ready to make this decision on the spot. Their finance guy came over trying to get us to buy. He asked what our jobs were and my husband told him he was in the military. So the finance guy said that he could offer us a military rate that would drop it to $13,000. He told us our payments would only be $323 with their financing which is based off of 17%!! We still did not want to buy so he offered to reduce the price again and give us 5 weeks a year. The new price was $9,990. We told him no because we refused to pay that much interest, wanted to talk to our bank, and were not prepared to make this decision. The sales associate then informed us that if we didn’t buy that day we would miss out and would never get this rate again. (So much for no pressure, huh?) He then turned 180 degrees and became very rude once he realized that there was NO way we were going to buy that day. We were escorted out to this other guy to take a short survey. He then said that he could reduce the price to a little over $5,000. We still said no.
After all this, we were put in this room to wait for our names to be called so we could collect our tickets that were promised to us. We were told this whole thing would only take 2 hours. We were going on the 4th hour. We look around and there are a lot of people just standing around and all we want to do is leave. My husband got up to ask someone when we would be getting out of here. To my amazement, the guy started shouting at my husband saying that they are doing the best they can and to go sit down. It was VERY unprofessional. When we finally got out of there and loaded up onto the shuttle, we were not the only ones that felt frustrated and pressured. Everyone else on the shuttle had the same complaints. Also, to my surprise, apparently everyone got the “military discount.” There was no such thing as a military discount. It was more of a “oh, no! You didn’t buy on the first price discount.”
Also, on a side note, they were not upfront about all the costs. They said that there is a yearly “maintenance fee” of $677. What they don’t tell you is that this price can go up over time. Also, you are not guaranteed a week when you want to transfer to a different resort. Plus, you have to pay to switch weeks and resorts. On top of that, you are still making your monthly payment for a property you can only visit once a year….this is a waste of money! They will throw a whole bunch of numbers at you and scribble all over this packet to try to confuse you. Stay alert and think about this…it is not worth it.