Complaint Review: AVR-Celebrity Resorts

We had a Med Resorts vacation club membership, for 15 years, $5K, set up in IL from early-90's.

At some point, the company was sold or reorganized into American Vacation Resorts, same program.When visiting their Daytona location in 2004, we were told that AVR could offer more options to their members by joining the RCI Points program, so by adding another 5 years, for $2,500, we upgraded our membership in AVR to the RCI points program.

Things worked well, until this spring 08, when we were called repeatedly by AVR to attend important meetings held locally in IL. Both of us (husband and wife), attended what was a very high pressure time share presentation. Contract Sales people explained that AVR-Celebrity could no longer manage the RCI Points program as we had it, so we had to buy a legitimate condo time-share. We could receive "credit" towards that purchase with our AVR membership. The alternative was to take our chances with the viability of AVR-Celebrity. We reluctantly signed the paperwork and was charged $9k on the credit card they opened for us that day.

Immediately, when we got home, we had buyers remorse, saying "what did we do, we can't afford $9k!" So we took the paperwork back to the hotel, talked with our same sales person, and said this is not what we want to do. She assured us the contract would not be in effect, and that all the paperwork we signed would be shredded. After several weeks, we did see the credit card transaction reversed.

At that point, we were thinking our AVR-Celebrity relationship was intact. But after not seeing our annual points added to RCI, we called AVR-Celebrity and found out our membership no longer exists. That they received the cancellation paperwork from this declined sales transaction and all our "equity investment" in the program is now gone.

They even had the nerve to send out a Welcome Back to AVR letter in late summer 08, to collect the same annual fee we paid as members. We paid that on 9/8/08, but with no indication this was for an entirely new relationship. No longer are we RCI points members, but we're restricted to approximately 20 of the Celebrity resorts for weekly vacations. Back to the old Med Resorts model of the past!!

We're out a lot of money and we got ripped off royally!!

Carole
Glen Ellyn, Illinois
U.S.A.