In early 2009 my wife and I were invited to look at timeshares in Morehead City, NC operated by the Festiva travel group. We were given a tour of the facility and a long song and dance on the benefits of utilizing Festiva for a vacation club. I'm active duty military and I expressed my concerns about my deployment schedules and inability to take scheduled and annual vacations as well as my limited income. The sales associate assured me that all points under this company accrued and we could use them at any time as well as use future points for vacations. Additionally, we were told if we purchased now we would receive an additional 2500 points if we contacted Festiva to roll the point into our next bi-annual time frame. We discussed the benefits of this program as it was presented and decided it would be a good idea. I should have known if it sounded to good to be true IT WAS! Since that very poor decision of investing with a SCAM of a company we have dealt with multiple unsatisfactory issues.
I deployed to Afghanistan for a year shortly after purchasing from Festiva and upon return was looking forward to using their service for a family vacation. However, my wife had contacted them to roll the initial points over for the following bi-annual term and was told she had to pay for the next term. She did, then we were accessed another fee and ultimately told that since she didn't contact them again before the end of the year we wouldn't get the additional points, but they would give us a weekend in Myrtle Beach if we would attend an hour presentation at their resort. We should have been suspicious of this, but we really wanted a family vacation after a year of being apart and thought it would work out. We went to some shack in Myrtle for the weekend and attended their high pressure sales presentation that lasted over 4 hours.By the time we left that meeting I wanted to terminate our contract, because we had learned several new things about our purchase. First, that we couldn't roll our points over they must be used in the 2 year time frame or we would lose them (we lost them). Second, the program we were enrolled in had enough points to spend maybe a night in the off season at one of there resorts. Ultimately we have found that anytime we have tried to use their service in either our nearby resort or any other there is never an opening. The costumer service is rude at best and very dodging when it comes to complaints. Emails and phone calls are not returned. My wife tried to schedule another vacation, because I'm deploying again in the next couple months and was told by a representative that "with our level of points she didn't know what we expected".
After much frustration we contacted them again in December and told them we would like to terminate our contract. We were told that they would send us information on how to sell our plan on the internet or through a travel company. We were never sent the information so at the beginning of the year we contacted them again and were told that since it was a new year we must pay our bi-annual dues and they would send information on how to terminate the aggreement. After spending over $7,000.00 we have yet to have a full vacation or be able to utilize our plan. This company is an obvious fraud and is taking advantage of our Countries service members, so I intend on reporting them to the base leadership, contacting a Attorney, and reporting them to a fraud agency.
I would highly recommend anyone considering dealing with Festiva to re-consider, because you will be very disappointed if you do any business with this company.
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