We were called with the offer for free airline tickets within the United States.in exchange for listening to the presentation. The latest presentation is $8,000 for membership to the exclusive travel agency. $6,000 was the price given for just that one presentation. The first person to raise their hand that morning could have the lifetime membership into the travel club for $5,000. The annual fees were described as $200 (supposedly it has not changed since 2005).
As far as I could tell, there weren't any people who were interested in joining the travel club at that price at that time.
Some elements of the travel agency seemed interesting (the promise of a 20% refund on verified receipts related to travel expenses). The hot list of soon to expire inventory of unused timeshare weeks in inventory seemed like it could be beneficial. But seriously, how many currently employed people can afford to take 2 weeks, much less 4 weeks, or 8 weeks of vacation in a given year?
One of the sales guys, who was just a guest presenter, explained that he could only get away for from work for a few weekends. Perhaps that would have been a better path to increase utilization. Capitalize on the weekend excursion crowd.
Perhaps the travel agency could capitalize on having better promotion of the services available.
A complicating factor was the differentiation of the standard plan versus the platinum membership plan with the platinum plan being transferrable, whereas the former plan was non-transferrable. The platinum plan was offered as a that morning only offer.
We do vacation, and we plan to vacation in the future, but I'm not sure that I'd be able to recover the $8,000 worth of savings any time soon.
I realize that every business is trying to make a buck.
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