JRC They Finally Cancelled - But Charged Us Anyway
Westgate Timeshare Resort Issues
Date of Incident: 9/21/2003
My husband and I also went on a time share sales tour in Gatlinburg this past August and decided to purchase one of their units. After returning home and doing some research work, we decided to cancel our time share contract. Within the ten days, we boxed up all of their material we were given and returned it to them. Yesterday we received the letter confirming cancellation of the "upgraded" contract and the reinstallation of the "original" contract. I will be contacting them tomorrow regarding their letter. We initially told them that we needed to think about the purchase overnight and they said that the only "legal" way to do so to lock in their quoted price was to sign their Vacation Occupancy & Price Lock In Agreement and put $200 down for a 24 hour hold which we did. That would be applied to our time share purchase if we decided to go ahead and purchase which we did. I guess that they consider the original 24 hour hold agreement to be our "original" contract. Have you heard of anyone else with a similar situation and what can be done legally to cancel our "original" contract? Our experience with Westgate leaves much to be desired and we would recommend that anyone considering signing anything they put in front of you be read AND understood completely before signing. Unfortunate for us, we had left our reading glasses in the car that first day and trusted them when they said all we were signing was a 24 hour hold on the price. I'll forward on to you the response we receive from them tomorrow. Any suggestions on further dealing with Westgate would be appreciated.
----------
I made several calls to Westgate yesterday. You never get the same person twice. I know for sure that the time share purchase is cancelled. We also received a letter yesterday from them advising that the Vacation Traveler Agreement has been cancelled. Would you believe that they subtracted $43.80 from our $200 deposit and charged us for the "complimentary" new owner breakfast that they sent us to. It is obvious to us that we signed a different paper than most people sign as they quoted about receiving Contract Benefits therefore subtracting the breakfast charges. Have you had any repercussions putting your experience online? I am strongly considering trying to contact 60 minutes, the Florida and Tennessee Attorney Generals and the newspapers in Gatlinburg and Orlando. They are doing things or NOT doing things that I believe are not right. One thing I noticed was that they didn't give us a copy of the paper we signed stating our right to cancel within 10 days. They told us our copies were on a cd rom disc that they gave us but everything on it was generic. The letters regarding cancellation are NOT dated either. I have made notations on them as to when we received them. As things stand today, our contract or contracts with them are cancelled. I intend to contact my credit card company and send copies to get a FULL refund on our deposit too. I don't plan to contact the Better Business Bureau as I have found that they do very little to help the consumer. Thanks for taking the time to put your complaint online as it has helped us. Hope things worked out OK with you.
All Westgate problem reports are submitted via email by the actual
person who participated in the timeshare incident. Submissions are not
edited in any fashion. Names are not shown for privacy reasons.
Main Listing of Problem Reports with Westgate Timeshare Resorts