My wife and I bought a Starpoint resort "membership" about a year ago where a combination of high pressure tactics and presumptive selling techniques convinced us to buy a timeshare participation in Starpoints.
As bad as the intial tactics went, they were bad, but not much worse that those we had previously resisted in timeshare sales by RCI affiliated companies around the globe.
The truth is, we like the look of the deal, although we didn't like any of the people we were dealing with. So we signed up.
Since then the whole thing has been a gigantic rip off, with a collection agency, Equiant, calling repeated over and over again, and although we have been members less than one year, they have already collected two full years of membership fees from us. $1200 in all. We have to use our membership, but we have certainly been paying for it.
Their collectors are abusive on the telephone, with rude attitudes and snarky remarks. Let have left rudemessages on my telephone, and made snarky rude comments to my staff at work.
This past month I paid my annual fees and my membership financing charges, all in all about $650.00. I got a call from the collector Pam, who started off rude and got worse in the course of the call. When I told her that I would try to get my payment caught up I was told that they were charging me $4.50 per day on my $200 monthly payment, which adds up to 746% compounding interest on the outstanding balance owed on the payment. She said that this wasn't her problem, and the fact that the rate of "interest" was probably illegal really didn't matter. She said to talk to Starpoint and Geoholidays.
They don't have the ability to accept an automatic payment from a Canadian Bank account, which means that I have to pay them through a credit card, to which they add a $20.00 service fee. They don't accept online payment through Paypal, nor any other normal payment through banking.
I am truly fed up with the greedy, rude and insulting organization.
0 comments