Got the nifty card offering a free cruise and my hubby and I love cruising and it seemed interesting being a non time share offer so we bit.
The presenter was a sweet old lady who charmed the money out of everyone in the room that day. Literally. Wonder if she got a bouns? After her impressive, endearing presentation that was too good to be true, they sent individual sales folks to each table to go in for the kill. Our seller 'Tamara' from WA (shame on you!) could see i was a bit hesitant about this 'too good to be true offer' and excused herself. She came back about a minute later and said. Ive never done this before but I asked and I can give it to you for a thousand dollars less, and another thousand off if w pay with a credit card today. I just got the ok from my supervisor. I made a joke about this being like buying a used car. (i continued to fight off the gnawing feeling of stupidity)
I asked as many questions as I could possibly think of and she seemed to have an answer for everything and took us out of the room to seal our fate. Still being nervous, I asked her directly, sort of joking about how could I cancel when i got home and got buyers remorse and she almost mumbled that we had the regular three days. (It was no where in writing though)
We put about 5100 dollars on the card and got our leather bound package with surprisingly little info about the company itself and a lot of random vacation info. I immediately tried to log on to the website to see the discounted vacations they had told us about. The vacations that intrigued me the most. NO access without a login and a password but we would get that in 72 hours. Hmmm isn't that just after the cancelation period is expired? BINGO! Im starting to feel queazy now.
I called Tamara who had given us her number and she tells me I can come back to the hotel tomorrow and look at the vacation deals with her boss on the computer they have there. I said ok, and my hubby and I continue to research the company. A search doesn't give us a lot of info.in fact they look rather innocent and I almost 'poo poo'ed' and decided not to be so paranoid but hubby found info re a company name change and this wonderful website called usacomplaints.com and I called Tamara again and told her i was coming in and would be needing to speak to her boss about possible cancelation. I told her about the awful reports and she told me she was completely unaware.
I got there and very firmly told the boss guy that this was unacceptable and they should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of the many many senior citizens that buy into this. People that are not internet saavy are completely unaware of this horrible scheme until its too late. Tamara later told me she was reconsidering working for this company and seemed like she was perhaps genuinely aghast. I hope so. I was given my original contract back with a refund for the full amount. I haven't verified it yet with my CC company but will in a few hours to make sure. I feel very lucky to have gotten out as unscathed as i did.
One last thing. Im going to be calling Royal Carribean as these rip offs used their logo on the little card offering the free crusie. I read that carnival had them stop using their logo after rip off reports were brought to their attention.
Good luck to you all. Long live Expedia.com and Orbitz
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