My wife and I traveled to Mazatlan for a 2 week vacation at the end of January. After standing in line for an hour at the airport to get through customs and immigration we were tired and ready to take a taxi to our hotel El Cid Castilla. We approached the taxi booth and asked for a taxi. This is where things started to go wrong. We were informed that we could have free taxi rides to and from the hotel and a number of other free gifts' if we attended a presentation. At that point we just wanted to get our taxi ride so we agreed to do this.
When we went to the presentation the next morning we were met by a charming Mexican woman and given breakfast and champagne at the premier El Cid restaurant (La Choncha). At this point things seemed OK.
We then went into the presentation room and were shown a video of the new El Cid resort at Cancun and it was explained to us that the El Cid Vacation Club was not like a regular timeshare you received points which could be used f or vacations all over the world, including cruises and flights. Although we were not interested in a Mexican timeshare as such, this appealed to us as we are recently retired and intended to travel anyway.
After the presentation from the first representative, a manager appeared and started making us offers of additional weeks holiday and upgrades if we signed a contract today.
The result was my wife and I purchased 154,000 points in the El Cid Vacation Club. At that time we stated that our interest in this offer was primarily due to its flexibility in providing us with cruise vacations and vacations at many resorts worldwide.in addition we were informed by the manager that it was possible to rent our allocation for approximately $4400 if we did not want to use it in a particular year. We also asked about whether there was any time limit on using our annual allocation and were informed there was not.
We felt good about our purchase initially and were looking forward to the holidays we would take with our points. We started to feel unsure a few days later after talking to some other guests with stories about presentations they had attended and what had been offered to them.
We decided to investigate further into the El Cid Vacation Club and these some of the things we found out:
The number of points we have is insufficient to book a cruise for two people. It would be far better to simply book trough the cruise line or one of the on-line cruise booking web sites (the ability to use our points for cruises was a major factor in our decision to purchase)
Other owners are attempting to rent their units for far less than the $4400 we were led to believe
We were told points do not expire but the ECVC web site clearly states that points expire after one year unless they are put into a pool for use in the following year and then must be used in that year
There are many reports on Internet forums about the difficulty of using ECVC points to book accommodations at other resorts outside of the El Cid home resorts
Based on the resale values we are seeing on the Internet, the cost we paid for our points is inflated and does not reflect their true value
Vacation club owners are being charged more to upgrade to all inclusive than it would cost non-owners.
Unfortunately we did not find out about the 5-day cancellation right in time because we were not given a printed copy of our contract although we asked for one at the time. This would have enabled us to find out about this during our stay. Because we were given a CD with the documents and not a printed copy and because we had no way of accessing this until we returned home we were deprived of the opportunity to take advantage of this cancellation period.
We emailed the El Cid manager as soon as we got home and had a chance to go through the contract. His response was that there were many happy owners but he wanted us to be happy so would pass along our email to the appropriate person at El Cid. A couple of days later we received an email from another El Cid employee saying he was reviewing our email and would get back to us tomorrow. Two weeks later we finally received another email from him stating he had reviewed the contract and spoken to the El Cid representatives we dealt with and could find no reason to cancel our contract (surprise, surprise).
So we are now already $4000 US out of pocket with another bill for $15,000 due in May plus of course the maintenance fees; and what we have is essentially worthless for our purposes. We have told El Cid we still want the contract cancelled and will be continuing to pursue this.
We only wish we had read some of the posts on this site before our trip, it's been an expensive lesson
Jamie
Kelowna, British Columbia
Canada
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