Adventures with Timeshares

For Christmas, I bought Jackie two tickets to see Celine Dion at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas last Sunday.  We booked our room and airfare, and then Celine cancelled all her shows for a few months.  Since I left my job a week ago, we found ourselves in Vegas with nothing in particular to do and no desire to spend a lot of money.  So when someone offered us free show tickets, free dinner, and admission to Madame Toussaud's to sit through a timeshare sales pitch, we decided, why not?  Neither of us had ever seen a timeshare presentation, and we were curious.

We were told the presentation would last 2-3 hours.  We were taken by bus to a location about 20 minutes from The Strip, called the Grandview, and then each couple from the bus was assigned a salesperson.  First warning sign:  A salesperson is going to spend 2-3 hours just with you.  Big investment on their part.  OK, maybe the first warning sign is the word "timeshare," and the second is that they give you free stuff to sit through it, but still, one salesperson per couple.

So we sit through a presentation hosted by a lady who used to play Marilyn Monroe in a Vegas show.  Not so much resemblance anymore, but nice enough lady.  And you don't just sit through it -- they make you participate.  The presentation is about how valuable and expensive vacations are, and it's OK.  They lie by claiming that they don't believe in high pressure sales, but no one believes them, and they give us sandwiches and drinks, so not bad so far.

Now we walk around with the salesman, and he shows us the property.  Nice enough.  Then he walks us up to an area to sit down and give us the  sales pitch.  I took a picture -- it's a big area with dozens of couples sitting with dozens of salespeople.  Now it's starting to get creepy, and I'm noticing that we're close to the three hour mark.  The sales guy is showing us numbers and is at the point where he doesn't stop talking long enough to let us say no.  When we finally say no anyway, he brings over a manager.  I let this guy go for a couple of minutes, then look right at him, tell him we absolutely will not commit, "don't waste your time."  He goes on, but not too much longer.

They send us downstairs to leave, and we talk to one more guy.  He says he wants to take a survey.  Liar.  Actually, he gives us one more pitch at a much lower price.  And after all this, we give in and buy.

OK, just kidding -- we said no, again.  Finally, we get our free stuff and get to leave.  The whole thing takes about four and a half hours, including an hour transportation back and forth and wating time.

A few disturbing signs:

• The price keeps dropping, dramatically.  The first offer is $42,000.  The last one is the same deal for $4,990.  Someone sometime must pay $42,000, or the $30,000 they offer later, or take the one bedroom every-other-year package for $10,000, and they are getting robbed.  It's fundamentally dishonest to ask $42,000 for something you are selling to someone else for $5,000.
• They insist that you buy same day.  To walk in and make that much of a commitment same day to something you knew nothing about that morning is insane.  To ask people to do that is fundamentally dishonest.
• Besides the big sales room we were in, the salesman showed us another room where current owners were looking to upgrade.  Lots of couples, each with a salesperson at their table.  The high pressure sales pitch doesn't stop when you buy!  That freaked me out.
• They kept touting that the address of the place is on Las Vegas Boulevard, the same street as The Strip.  OK, sure, but it's 20 minutes away.  Come on.
• Waiting on the bus to take us back, we talked to the people behind us.  They said that a couple from their presentation had bought, and they went back in a limo, not on the bus.  And Jackie pointed out that they don't want them talking to those of us who heard the $4,990 offer, because they probably paid a lot more.  So they give them a limo to isolate them.

In all, it wasn't a really bad experience for us.  It wasted a chunk of our day, but we got some free sandwiches, and it was interesting to see the sales pitch.  We didn't have enough time to go to the show or see Madame Toussaud's, because The Strip is big and we lost so much time, but we had a nice complimentary Italian dinner at The Venetian.  A guy was playing the violin at the tables, and when he approached us, I asked for La Vie en Rose, which he knew well and played for us.  We had wine and dessert and really enjoyed ourselves.

Today, we looked up those timeshares on EBay and elsewhere.  They are worth next to nothing, maybe a few hundred dollars.  Basically, the annual maintenance fees and other ongoing costs are about equal to the vacation value you get, so the value of the timeshare is nothing.  We're feeling pretty good about passing up the opportunity.