this royal holiday point system vacation club is a scam
Complaint
debra rodney glen
Country: Canada
I attene a presentation atthe cofort suite hotel in the bahamas on 26 December 2009 while on vacation ,i was approached by a person called Ewa who seem to be a third party for the royal vacation club,upon arriving there the atmosphere is friendly and one representative my andrew stephenson and senior manager julie ann burnett sold me a membership to the club which souund great for my family ,it is all a scam ,first of all this is all part of a greater scam which has its head office in mexico,these representatives are trained to get you to buy into this point system and none of the free trips promise are authentic,everything is a lieand fraud ,royal vacation needs to be investigated ,and possibly shut down
Comments
Don Phinney donphinney@hotmail.com / "Warning" If you get ahold of me, Mean it!! I have a GOV. File. and it will be tracked!
I was scammed--deceived, defrauded and duped--at the Wyndham Nassau Resort in New Providence, Nassau, in March 2011. I want to express my extreme frustration with Royal Holiday Club's predatory sales practices. Since I was hoodwinked into signing a contract with this unethical company, I have been obliged to pay $220 per month and an annual fee in excess of $1,000. In exchange I have received NO net benefits--I would have saved thousands and thousands of dollars by making travel arrangements myself for the one resort trip I did manage to work out with Royal Holiday Club. Including the inittial credit card payment of $15,000, over the past two years I have been obliged to pay them a total of $20,300.
I would like help in taking steps to cancel my contract with Royal Holiday Club. The huge amounts of money I've wasted in payments is a secondary concern, but I would like to recover any of it I can.
My wife and I were taken in by a deceptive high-pressure sale at the Wyndham in Nassau in March 2011. Having second thoughts soon thereafter, we attempted to cancel the contract prior to the closing of the five-day window in which cancellations were permitted by law, but a sales representative persuaded us to remain on the timeshare plan with the offer of extra points and travel vouchers--which disappeared completely by the time we needed them. Those hundreds of additional points turned out to be nothing, nothing but empty promises. Of course none of these promises were given in written form: they were only so much talk.
Two years after signing I finally managed to get a booking that coincided somewhat with my travel plans. This after numerous phone calls to attempt to get bookings we could use, and after making costly payments to Royal Holiday and receiving evasive explanations from company representatives on the phone. Indeed, my wife and I have spent hours and hours on the phone listening to company representatives give long and convoluted "explanations" of policies. At our last call on May 17, 2013, we sought an explanation of the system by which we could know how many points we needed to transfer to affiliate RCI to get a desired accommodation, but no one could or would explain how. Agents sent our call and query to other departments, whose representatives subjected us to other long and complicated run-arounds. And it turned out that the point transfer and combination of weeks, which I had to do blindly without knowing how many points were needed for my desired accommodation, would cost an additional $260, and the points I had transferred would expire if I didn't use them over the next three months. That, and the extremely long holds on which they put us while we waited on the phone to be served, made the whole process of getting the plan an excruciating ordeal. After we obtained our booking, RCI told us that other substantial charges will likely be added at the resort destination.
The ugly truth is this: The surcharges for transfers and combinations, the monthly deductions from my credit card, and the huge yearly fee are seriously damaging my future prospects for financial security. And the yearly fee is steadily going up, no matter what I say or do in protest. All told, the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life is to sign on with this predatory unscrupulous company. There have been NO net benefits coming from Royal Holiday and affiliate RCI, to which I was told to send my "transfer powers." I would have saved thousands by making bookings on my own. I"m sick and tired of this consumer fraud of global proportions, and I'm mortified to know that the governments of Arizona, Florida, Mexico, the Bahamas and the United States are doing nothing to eliminate this blight on the vacation-travel industry--even after the airing of the 20/20 exposé of Royal Holiday in 2008.
Regrettably, a Wyndham representative emailed a response to my complaint to tell me that Royal Holiday was not a Wyndham affiliate, but instead was leasing an office at their resort. Shame on Wyndham, I say, for hosting and thus enabling such a massive fraud to operate for years on their premises.
Please help us find a way to escape the contract or tell us about any class action suit we can join so we can close down this rapacious and scurrilous "club," to which I sadly and contractually must continue to belong despite my urgent need to break away. Is there anything I can do? In the meantime I will spread the alarm in every available forum about the Royal Holiday Vacation Scam.
Thanking you for any help you can give.
Royal Holiday Club and I have ended our relationship in a positive and fully satisfactory manner. Please delete and remove my complaint and any of my postings with information related to Royal Holiday Club. Thank you.
With best regards,
Gino Philip Eno
In my case, RH can go to *** because we are not paying these scammers anymore!