Time Share salesmen
Tuesday Feb 27, 2007
Staci, Ferrin and i went to Orlando this past weekend to get some quick play time. We got a call from the Hilton Grand Vacation folks who offered us an almost free stay at a Hilton hotel in the southern Orlando area if we came in and talked to them about their "Vacation Club" Which I'm sure if you feed it through some translation tool comes out as "Time Share".
Ferrin has been anxious to go to Disney again, so we decided a quick trip would be good.
I'll cover the Fun part of the trip in another post, but I want to talk about this Vacation Club thing....
It's a Time Share... period. They try to obscure it by giving you "Points" that you can use the get to and use all types of Hilton and non-Hilton properties all around the world. That sounds all well and good, but since they are using "points" and not dollars, that conversion factor is obscured to you so it's almost impossible to determine if you are getting a good deal or not.
Add to that, the fast that yo have to filter the points necessary for a particular stay through their HUGE booklet describing times of year, room type, etc. and you'll never know how you're doing.
I like the idea of paying for a vacation plan to get the best value out of your dollars, but it's impossible to compare them.
These things are expensive. We were getting sold on the "entry" 7000 point plan and the resulting cost was about $30k... 7000 points would get you about 1.5 weeks a year in the vacation club resorts. There are about 30 of them around the US, but 15 of them are in Florida.
The real kicker here is that you had to pay $7000 up front, and had to use their financing at 16.5 percent.
These guys were trained really well. They had a plan and said all the right things to make you feel like you needed it, or were the only ones not taking this great deal. The buy actually tried to tell us that 1 in 3 folks who came into the sales office that day bought the plan... BullSh#$!
There is no way that I could make a $30k decision in the two hours we were there.
I spend more time than that researching which vacuum cleaner to buy. (I got a Dyson by the way :)
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Posted by Eric on February 27, 2007 at 04:14 PM EST #