for sale: one dignity, going cheap

[the_siobhan]

Anybody ever been suckered into going to one of those time share presentations?

I got a call the other day about how I have "won" a holiday and all I have to do is view a 90-minute presentation. I know they're going to try and sell me something, but it might be worth it if I get a cheap weekend away out of it.

So anybody done this before? How much of a pain is it to sit through the presentation? (tetsab, I seem to recall that your mother put you through something like this once.)

Comments

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

we went to one when i was a kid. my parents left after 4 hours empty handed.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

Call me a cynic, but I figure those things are a scam designed to get you into a room where they can give you a hard sell and pressure you to hand over your personal info.

Also, when I'm told that I've won something, I don't expect to have to pay for it. These scams always seem to involve buying a membership, or committing to X number of weekends at Y resort before you get a free weekend or something.

[jola.livejournal.com]

bull, it'll be a weekend-long brainwashing. If you think they'll leave you alone for the rest of the weekend ... well, you are mistaken ;p

[(Anonymous)]

And even without the brainwashing, consider the weekend. It's bound to be one of those plastic resort packages, with a tacky tasteless atmosphere. At any rate, several years back when I was considering this (w/ A, who turned the idea down) I realized I didn't want to spend my weekend at the resort they were plugging.

[betonica.livejournal.com]

oh, uh, that was me.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

My parents and most of their friends, over the years. None of them have ever bought whatever the seminar was selling, and they've scored some good free breaks.

The presentations can be pretty tedious. It helps if you can switch your brain off for a while.

[markeris.livejournal.com]

I keep *winning* these. From costa del crook or someone (CDC anyway). The Guardian did a nice piece on one of these where their financial consultant went along instead of the prizewinner. My one is a 7 night stay in a resort in Turkey, Spain, Austria or somewhere else that escapes me with flights and half board included.

Assuming uniformity of *scam*, it`s was above level given the following :-

- if you got confused / scared and said yes at any point you found yourself signing to a fairly questionable scheme.
- the free holiday was based on paying an admin fee (around £30) and it being in one of several slots that you had to indicate (so you don`t get a precise choice).
- no-one ever mentioned that the free holiday was leaving from an airport 300 miles away. Of course you can go from one nearer to you. That`ll be another surcharge please.
- if you decide not to bother what with them pulling all manner of things designed to make you decide not to bother, your initial admin fee isn`t refundable.
- holiday was conditional upon a few hours - which in reality translates as nearly a full day - being shown around the resort you choose on arrival
- resorts are of course designed for people who don`t actually like being abroad and want to be hermetically sealed in a false environs but with more sun. Invariably they will have brought their screaming kids with.

Basically, if I was prepared to spend 2-3 hours going "f*8k off. f**k off. No really. f**k off. You`re upsetting my missusm f**k off. No really, you`re bullying my missus now, I don`t understand which part of that you think doesn`t end with me punching you in the face and rightly so" (for which i`d apparently also get free tickets to a west end musical) and was prepared to pay probably in the region of £100-£150 in admin / additional charges on top, and was prepared to go through the whole "f**k off" speech again, but for the best part of a day and in somewhere that was a bit harder to just walk out of, then I would have got a free holiday, somewhere I didn`t want to go, surrounded by people I`d all things considered rather not be anywhere near. I kind of figured that given the point of holidays is to destress at the end of my free holiday I`d actually have had a minus level of holiday experience and declined curtly.

[montieth.livejournal.com]

Big waste of time. How much is your time worth?

[griffen.livejournal.com]

My ex and I went to one back in the day (my experience is over 10 years ago, so take with shaker of salt). We sat through a high-pressure sales pitch for a time share, said No over and over again, and left after about an hour and a half to two hours with a voucher for a weekend on Catalina Island. We ended up giving the voucher to his sister when her baby died and she needed to get away for a few days.

The presentation is a pain in the ass, but you can sit through it. It's designed to make you jealous of the rich people who have timeshares and long vacations in exotic places. If you can resist that, you can resist the timeshare.

[empressjad.livejournal.com]

If you have *nothing* else to do that weekend, and the "seminar" is scheduled someplace you think you'd find enjoyable, then it might be worth the time.
We did a couple of these...one in Boston, and another in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
As mentioned, the seminar was exceedingly tedious, but I was able to tune it out. I worked on various projects and no one there objected. I made lists, even did a bit of knitting. They did ask about the knitting, but I just replied that it was tension reliever.
Maybe it was just luck, but the presentation was scheduled from 10-noon, and 1-3, on Saturday. The rest of the time we had to ourselves, except for a "goodbye" meeting that lasted about 30 minutes on Sunday. We did get maybe half a dozen telephone messages, but that only lasted a week or so.
Not a bad price for a free weekend...

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

To clarify, the seminar is here. We find out which of the four weekends we have "won" after the 90 minutes is over.

[valatina.livejournal.com]

That's how we made the trip to Vegas so "cheap"

[the-other-j.livejournal.com]

My family got free airfare for a vacation in Florida out of one of these deals when I was about 6. I hadn't a clue what was going on at the time, of course. All I knew was that one afternoon, instead of going to a theme park or a beach, my parents dropped me off at a strange daycare centre in a big building and I spent a couple of hours learning to play zither[1]. Only when I was much older did I realise that, during that interval, my parents had been listening to the sales pitch for the time-share.

[1] I have since forgotten this skill.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

We figure Florida is the most likely result, since it's the most common location for these kind of timeshares.

The pertinent question then becomes whether or not we want to visit Florida twice in one year.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

I've seen this episode of South Park.
It'll end with a skiing competition.
You'll end up fighting for The_Axel's honour, or something.

Disco may be involved.