My family and I went to Cozumel Mexico for vacation on July 3 -7. On July 4, we attended a 90-minute timeshare presentation and purchased a one bedroom suite from Sunset Lagoon Beach for $10,000. We were pressured relentlessly over and over from their sales people.
We were told that Sunset would guarantee the rental income of $1,000 for an unused week if we rent our weeks through Resorts International Marketing Corp (RIMC) with one-time processing fee of $549. The salesman Jayeson kept saying that it was a win-win situation. He told us that he was new and didn’t have any business cards yet and wrote down his number on our envelope in case we had any questions. We were staying in Cozumel which is a 45 min ride across the ferry. The next morning both of us felt sick to our stomach about what had happened and tried calling Jayeson to cancel. The phone number that he wrote down was missing one digit and did not work. The operators did not speak English and we had no way of looking up the number. We then tried calling the 1-800 number in the book (Sunset Reservations) and the lady said that I needed to talk to the resort directly. The number to the resort was not listed anywhere on anything that we were given. We had to wait until we returned home to look up the number. Upon returning home from Cozumel on July 7th, we started reviewing the contract very carefully and quickly realized that many promised items were missing in the contract. That’s when I started researching online about the Sunset group to see whether other people’s contracts are also missing the same thing and how they are coping with the problem. After a few hours of extensive research, we found very disturbing information. Many people (mostly Americans) were promised the same or similar things and no promises made were incorporated into their contracts and Sunset is not honoring the promises they have made.in one of the cases we found on Internet, the guarantee of the rental income was written in the contract, but this guarantee is not true and not being honored by Sunset (see http://www.savingadvice.com/forums/showthread.php? P=35113 for details).
On July 8th we called the resort upon returning home and after speaking to several people from the customer service department, I spoke with Doris. She was very rude and wanted to know what was wrong with the contract and that we would have to fax her a formal complaint and she would to take it to the board of directors to see if they would give us a refund or not. I also explained to her that we were told that we would be able to use a week in December and the contract said we couldn’t use a week until 2007. She then told me to send her the sheet that said we could use a week in December and I told her that they kept all the papers that they wrote down the weeks that we could use and explaining the perks we were offered.
We were told that we would have 2 weeks per year starting in 2006. We could rent out one week and that would basically pay for our week. When we were through signing everything the guy said that there was a mistake and took our papers. He brought in new papers that showed the correct amount of weeks being given and apologized. We were so tired and under complete duress from being pressured and being there so long we didn’t even notice the mistake. Once we returned home we noticed that we were given the original papers that we signed.
We were lied to and want a full refund.
0 comments