RSS
Home
Timeshare Examiner: Readers write - continued
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Corrine and the salesman in front of the under-construction resort
From Brad K: Mark: I confess. I went to the Consolidated Resorts pitch as a result of this Tanya Roberts commercial. The good part was we stayed in a beautiful Westin hotel and had free air. We were well taken care of.
The bad? Well, the tacky sales presentation, that included people putting up 30K to buy into time shares...and then they would have you come up on a stage to burst balloons...in which were held other prizes, such as a trip to Australia.
You also got to spin a wheel for prizes. They do a hard sell, which was easy enough to ignore, being poor and all. It was about two hours of multi level sales, like in a car dealer...the "manager" would come over to pick up where the underling failed.
The funniest part was they promised us that if we bought, and went through the motions of spinning the wheel, they promised we would win the Top Prize, which was a whole bunch of trips to various places around the world... Not a bad thing...but like, who is going to put up thousands of dollars in a wheel of fortune like setting? I guess some people, because some did it. The timeshare was ok, by the way. Not as nice as many of the strip hotels, but with a little more room and big screen TVs.
The negative? The in-house restaurant was Howard Johnsons...puhleese. It seemed tacky to me. Maybe it was classy for the mobile home set. But in this recession, for these prices, you can just buy a house and rent it out the weeks you don't want it.
It was a weird experience. First time I did that. Most people were there for the freebies, but it looked like quite a few bought the package.
Also, Corinne thinks: it wasn't Howard Johnsons, but Dennys...or some fast food place. Not sure...but it wasn't what one would think of as upscale.
My comments: They invite you to Vegas with the lure of seeing a beautiful resort, but you end up staying a traditional hotel, not the timeshare property.
There are a few reasons for that; the timeshare resort “is for owners”; but of course this is not a valid point, since much timeshare finds its way to the rental market. There is not enough space at the resort to accommodate all the sales prospects taking them up on the freebie offer. This is likely accurate, particularly because usually the timeshare resort is not fully built out yet.
But there is another, even more compelling reason. The sales office wants the prospect in a hotel or motel room, to give greater impact to the contrast between the “two beds and a lamp” hotel and the spacious multi-room timeshare condo’s they will visit on the tour.
The switching from sales person to sales person (the TO, or turnover in industry parlance) occurs for a couple of reasons. The initial sales person is supposed to gauge and establish interest in the prospect. They often do not have real estate licenses, which in most states, means they cannot talk price.
There is a little bit of good cop/bad cop with the different faces. A future column will focus on some of the games played at the sales table. To be clear, I have not been to a Consolidated sales presentation yet.
From Mark - Half my family are LDS members in SLC and Vegas, who love and respect me as openly gay. I will NEVER travel back to Utah, or spend a dime on Utah products. Cinemark theaters which is a venue at Sundance, will put in jeapordy any of the films at the festival being boycotted.
I urged all Sundance sponsors to move the festival outside of Utah in January, by my letters. The sponsors must be following through, Robert Redford is asking Utah State for funds.
Cinemark as a major contributor to Prop 8, faces a boycott that even the epic gay Rights film MILK, won't persuade LGBTs to go to those theaters, we're going ELSEWHERE, and for a business already facing tough competition from mail order films, Cinemark pushed the WRONG people around.
No further comment necessary
