We purchased what "appeared" to be an excellent "Time Share" plan. We considered this an investment because once the time share was paid off (10 years), all you had to pay was the yearly maintenence fees of approximately $250. Plus you could pass this to your heirs in the event of death.
We bought a "ONE WEEK" per year plan (5,000 points) which was "upgradable" at any time in 5,000 point intervals. This plan also included TWELVE "fling weekend getaways". Also with this plan, if you wanted to "extend" your stay at your destination, all you had to do was pay an additional "member rate" of $350 per week. All this for a price of about $8995.
With this plan you could go away once every month and buy an additional week at your destination. Who wouldn't like that? We bought this plan so that we could book our honeymoon in Hawaii which at the time was upcoming in about a year. When we called to book it, we were told NOTHING was available, there was a 2 year wait. So changing our honeymoon plans... We tried to book Paris instead. They told us the SAME thing, another 2 year wait. So we decided to book a cruise through ANOTHER SOURCE, since we weren't getting anywhere with this company.
We later (after our wedding) decided to try booking something more local for A WEEKEND, like the Pocono Mountains... AGAIN NOTHING AVAILABLE! How can that be? The Pocono Mountains is a HUGE resort! So I asked my wife to try booking A WEEKEND in Atlantic City, surely they have "something" available... AGAIN, NOTHING AVAILABLE! So as a LAST RESORT & "A TEST", this time I asked my wife to try booking A WEEKEND "ANYWHERE" in the state of New Jersey. To my amazement... She told me there was NOTHING AVAILABLE. It was at this point that we felt we were ripped off.
They also did NOT respond to ANY of our phone contact attempts OR email attempts. NO RESPONSE WHATSOEVER, in fact, they had so many voice mail messages that the voice mail box was FULL for a few months and they weren't accepting any new messages.
They overcharged my credit card by $250 in the beginning and since I could NOT reach a human being by phone OR email, I had to take off work and physically drive to the King of Prussia location and have this resolved, which they did but it took about 2 hours to resolve this and another week before it showed in my account again.
It was now time to take action. We got in touch with our attorneys in Center City, Philadelphia and had them research this company. We found out that there were NUMEROUS unresolved complaints against them with the BBB and they had filed bankruptcy (Chapter 11 or 13) Our attorneys are close personal friends and this firm GETS results. We were told that we had a very good case, however, even if we won the case there wasn't much chance of collecting it because of the bankruptcy and the many other numerous claims filed against them.
This was suppossed to have SAVED us money on our honeymoon, instead we paid another nearly $3,000 for the cruise IN ADDITION to making the worthless payments EVERY MONTH to this RIP-OFF company.
So at this point, we have been RIPPED OFF nearly $3,000, have NOTHING to show for it, WENT NOWHERE because we COULDN'T BOOK ANYTHING and it appears that we have "NO RE-COURSE" either. Needless to say, we decided to stop payment and were HARASSED for a few months until our attorney sent a letter and straightened them out once and for all.
I have lost all trust in this company forever. If this company were "solvent", we would've been entitled to something like FIVE TIMES our current invested amount because of additional damages.
It is ILLEGAL to collect money for a service and NOT provide a reasonable level of that service whatsoever. I'm not sure right now what our attorney called it but "Misrepresentation of services" or "Fraud" seems to be appropriate. I will update this report at a later date with the EXACT description of the ripoff.
Dave
Levittown, Pennsylvania
U.S.A.
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