My wife and I recently (March) received a marketing brochure in the mail offering a free 8 day cruise and 2 airline tickets as part of a promotion for us to attend a sales seminar. I called the toll free number and the representative "qualified" us for the seminar. Qualifications were simply to have sufficient income and possess a drivers license and major credit.
Having never attended anything like this before I entered with an open mind and did absolutely no advanced research on the idea. I only knew from the phone call that it would be a 90 minute presentation and the services being offered were involving a travel club membership of some sort.
When my wife and I arrived we had to display our drivers licenses and a single major credit card to enter. Once inside we filled out a simple questionaire. So far so good.
The seminar room was set up with about a dozen small round tables all having extactly 3 chairs per table. 2 chairs on one side of the table (for the couples) and 1 chair on the opposite side of the table (for the presenter). Our first names were also written on a display piece on the table so the sales people could easily know us all by name.
The presentation started with a presenter sitting down across from us and just chatting casually about us, our families, our travel habits etc. There was a presenter for every table. After about 15 minutes of this the presenters go to the back of the room and the seminar presentation begins for the whole group.
To summarize, their travel club, myvacationconnection, was comprised of 250,000 members and the company provided deep discounts on travel (hotels, cruises, airlines, car rental, resorts, condos) by buying vacations in bulk from travel designers and selling them directly to it's members and cutting out the middle men.
The cost was $8995 plus $399 startup fee plus $249 annual fee which the presenter covered up front. Part of his presentation was to cover the costs up front and also tell us all that instead of a 90 minutes presentation he was going to give us a 45 minute presentation if we participated well.
During the presentation he quoted prices of cruises and resort hotels that were made to sound like good deals, but without the ability to verify or compare the prices nobody could know for certain.
At the end of the seminar is when the magic started to happen. The great offer was for "today" only. It included a host of add-ons including "forever" membership. That's right. This membership was trasferrable, willable and continued after death. Not only that, but you could add up to 5 family members to the plan at no additonal cost. Plus a $1000 voucher would be given to the first couple to sign up today.
After the group presentation a salesperson sat at each table and began their personal presentation. They turned on some rather loud music during this time. I suppose it's designed to get you in the buying mood but more importantly it drowns out the conversations from the other tables. I even had some difficulty hearing the sales guy across from me at times.
After about 20 - 30 minutes the music cut off briefly (and intentionally) and their seemed to be a celebration for the first couple to sign up. From what I could tell this was fictional and once again designed to get people in the buying mood. After about 20 seconds of celebration the music started up again.
When it came to the close and I said "no thanks" they asked whether it was the money or the service that was preventing me from buying today. I said "neither". The problem was that I had no time to do standard due diligence and evaluate the program and determine if it was indeed a good value. I needed to compare them to competitors and see member reviews online. I told them it would be foolish to invest such a large amount of money without a proper review.
After insisting that I would not do any impulse buying today, the price started to drop. It was dropped several times over the next 20 minutes until finally a new salesperson sat with us and told us some story about a woman defaulting on her loan to join and we need only pay the difference. Of course by now I was ready to leave because I hate being lied to and this clearly was not true.
The lowest offer we got was a one year trial membership with all the perks for $750, but after the default story no price would get me to buy. So we got our free gift coupons and left.
When I got home I started doing research. Although I could find quite a few complaints I could not find hardly any A member reviews from the alleged 250,000 members. Of those I did see the reviews were not very good.
The domain myvacationconnection.net was created in Oct. 2011. The President, Richard Blaum, was linked to a virtual office at 4144 N. Central Expressway Suite 600 Dallas TX.
MY questions were 1) Why would any company go to such lengths to try to conceal their identity? 2) Why would they give me examples of cheap vacations but not allow me even a single day to verify or compare the deals?
In conclusion this vacation club is either a bad deal or something worse. Based on member reviews you can save some money, about 5 - 15%, if you give them plenty of advanced notice and mutliple options for destinations. Of course at the price they quote it would take the average traveler about 20 vacations to recoup the investment cost and unless you travel frequently it could take many years. That's also assuming they remain solvent long term, you remain healthy enough to travel and can still afford it 15 - 20 years from now.
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