We received an unsolicited sales call announcing the imminent opening of a "new travel agency" in our town and an invitation to attend a sales presentation in exchange for a free 4-day, 3-night vacation in our choice of Orlando, Las Vegas or Cancun (or a 4-day cruise). We usually turn such things down out of hand but if a new travel agency was opening we were interested (we asked if this was a timeshare and were promised that it was not). The company, we were told, was called "Vacations For Life."
We attended the 90 minute presentation, which was not for a new local travel agency but a travel club called Travel To Go (based in San Diego, CA), with Vacations For Life as the sales agent. There were a number of people involved in putting on the presentation but one important individual was John A. Jureidini, a manager, who later turned up in an important web search (see below). We also learned from Mr. Jureidini that Terrence Pridmore was the president (although in our later inquiries the hotel told us their documentation from Vacations For Life showed Mark Hillman was the president).
So — just to keep this straight: our call had come from Vacations For Life, which was putting on the presentation. The travel club was Travel To Go, which was the product Vacations For Life was selling. Hillman, Jureidini, Pridmore and the others were all associated with Vacations For Life; no one there claimed to work directly for Travel To Go.
The 90 minute presentation made amazing promises of enormous discounts on travel, with prices as low as $199/week for last minute "Hot Weeks" in luxurious resort condominiums (that was the price for the unit, not a per-person price). Four weeks of such accommodations per year were part of the program, making this a kind of "floating timeshare" with no attachment to any particular property. Travel To Go, we were told, was the largest travel wholesaler in the US; that much of what one purchased through Expedia or Orbitz or other such suppliers was actually sold to them by Travel To Go; that Travel To Go (and Sky Travel, its travel agency subsidiary located at the same address) was a major travel supplier to the likes of AAA, Coca-Cola, GE, etc., and that by joining we would eliminate the markup added by Expedia and other such entities.
The kicker: all this could be ours for a fee of $8,995 plus various administrative fees taking the total up to around $10K, and a $199 annual renewal thereafter. And YOU HAD TO PURCHASE ON THE SPOT or this opportunity would be gone forever. When we balked, the price was quickly negotiated down to $5,995 with all fees waived. Because there was a 72 hour right of rescission clause in the contract, we went ahead and signed up, charging the total to a credit card with the intention of carefully researching everything (it sounded too good to be true but the ability to cancel brought the risks down to what we were willing to at least explore — we should have been warned off by the need for an on-the-spot commitment).
When we got home and researched the situation, we found Mark Hillman mentioned right here on usacomplaints.com for a similar scam back in March using the name of Vacation Galleria. John A. Jureidini showed up in a press release from the New Jersey Consumer Affairs Office, announcing a lawsuit against him and his companies Holiday Connections and Holiday Destinations for their collective part in bilking New Jersey consumers out of $750,000 in phony travel club memberships — basically taking their money and running (the press release may be found at www.njconsumeraffairs. Gov/press/luxury.htm and both Holiday Connections and Holiday Destinations are all over usacomplaints. Coms too, with descriptions eerily similar to what we had seen in the presentation, followed by the discovery that it was all fraud and that it was very difficult or impossible to get one's money back after the discovery).
Most importantly, Travel To Go showed up in a March Emergency Order issued by the Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation (the complete text of the order may be found on the website of the Providence Journal, the newspaper of Rhode Island's capitol city, at www.projo.com/news/pdf0308_travel_agency_order. Pdf). The emergency order was particularly chilling, because it precisely described the EXACT sales presentation we had attended almost word for word! The Rhode Island presentations had been made by another company called Travel Solutions Inc., not Vacations For Life — but every detail of the presentations, from the initial cold call, to the descriptions of the benefits, to the pricing, to the statement that it was "now or never, " was the same.
What the Rhode Island office had discovered was that through concealed markups, additional fees, and fine print, the services offered by Travel To Go were the same or pricier than what was available through free sources. They also discovered that Travel To Go had been thrown out of the San Diego Better Business Bureau for repeated misconduct.
Naturally we cancelled within the 72 hours and placed an immediate chargeback via our credit card company, supplying them with all this information. A search on the automated corporation lookup system on the Connecticut Secretary of State's website showed that Vacations For Life is registered as a Connecticut Limited Liability company whose sole shareholder is Terrence Pridmore, 59 Albert Avenue, Fair Lawn, NJ. The company has no known address in Connecticut (the address we supplied is its registered incorporation agent in Old Saybrook, CT).
We also filed a report with Connecticut's Office of Consumer Protection, notifying them of the situation and the close resemblance to the New Jersey and Rhode Island cases.
Oh — and our "free 4-day, 3-night vacation or 4-day cruise"? Actually it was three days and two nights, and they structure it so you don't leave your home until after 3PM on the trip out and return between 6AM and noon on the trip back (there IS no cruise option at all — that was just a lie), so basically what you get is a lot of flying and a one-day stay at a no-name hotel far from anything interesting — for which you still have to pay "administrative fees." So that's bogus, too.
So it appears that there are any number of local entities in various places all selling memberships in Travel To Go based on essentially the same scripted presentation and probably using the same beautifully-crafted PowerPoint presentation. The local names of companies and individuals may be different, but the common scheme and plan is the same — and the same questionable characters seem to be attracted into this web over and over again.
Two words for you if you get one of these phone calls: HANG UP!
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