Complaint Review: El Cid/El Moro Beach Hotel

March 2, 2013

In late March 2012, we visited the El Cid/El Moro Resort (The Resort) in Mazatlan, Mexico where I had been a timeshare owner in the El Moro towers for 19 years.  Because I rate The Resort to be at best a three star out of 5 mega resort, I had stayed there only rarely in 19 years but traveled to Mazatlan almost annually. Because of a divorce, I no longer owned the timeshares at my favorite resorts so decided to give The Resort another shot.  Curious to know how the sales program had changed over the years, I took the free breakfast offer and went to the sales presentation only to discover that nothing had really changed but was only wrapped in prettier and more expensive paper; the deliberate material and fraudulent misrepresentations portion of the program was still in full swing and continued unabated.

Initially, we were taken to breakfast and given the room tour of the hotel towers by Victor Rivera, the first of three links in the traditional tag team sales approach.  His job is to gather all the information he can about you; employment, travel desires, timeshare ownership, etc.  Therefore, he knew I was an owner at The Resort, was staying in the unit I owned and owned other timeshares that were not frequently used and had weeks banked.  He also knew I was not about to undertake contract payments.  After conveying all he had learned to tag team members two and three, enter link number two, Rui Veloso.  He immediately took to the preliminary number spinning so that I would not have to make contract payments; I could return 10 of the 12 annual use weeks to the resort for $2500 per week and when the contract was paid off, The Resort would write me a check for $25,000 each year for those 10 weeks and, The Resort would take every week banked with Resort Condominiums International (RCI) and Interval International (II) from me for $1,500 each guaranteed.  Sounds like a sweet deal doesnt it?  Not only would my contract be paid off in very short order, but I would also be getting the $25,000 AND the $1,500 per banked week each year.  Now enter the closer, tag team member three and the guy who puts the numbers to paper and really puts the frosting on the cake, Mr. Super Slick, Jesus Osuna.  What Osuna does is inflate the contract price numbers and then concocts all these deducts to get to where the original contract price was to be in the first place; a credit for the contract price of my original contract which Osuna had pulled up on the computer before he entered the race, the $25,000 for the 10 weeks of the first year, etc. and like magic we arrive at a price of about $45,000 plus closing costs from the starting price of $102,000!!  After about $9,000 down, we had a balance of about $37,000.  They consumed about a day and a half of my one week vacation before I signed.  At signing, I read the contract and asked Osuna where all those numbers he had spun and the representations he had made had gone.  Willing to stop at nothing, he put his hand on a canvas bag that contained all my owner information and said, Its all in there, thereby incorporating all the contents of that bag by reference into the basic contract.  I signed and was happy to be rid of that bunch and their unscrupulous sales tactics so I could get on with my vacation, such as it was.

I returned home and immediately began getting my banked timeshare weeks in order.  Near the end of April, I called Osuna and said it was time to begin the process of importing the banked weeks with II and getting the credit applied against my contract balance.  In the first call or two I got all kinds of delaying tactics but pretended cooperation and when I told him that I had 11 weeks of a two bedroom unit banked with II he promptly said, Oh, I dont know if I can do that.  I continued to push and his return calls became more sporadic.  When I did get him on the phone the last time, I told him to add the person who handles reservations to the conversation and we would get II on the phone and accomplish the transfer of the banked weeks into The Resort.  He made excuses and the transfer never happened.  I had not even gotten to the weeks banked with RCI in our conversations but I had six weeks of a one bedroom lockoff with them.  You do the math regarding my contract balance!!  After that, he refused to take or return any of my calls.  I then began emailing him and never got a response.  The final email was a demand for contract rescission and a refund of all contract and maintenance fees paid.  My contract had been placed with a US Company, Resort Com. International in San Diego for the collection of contract payments.  In that I talked to them directly on three different occasions and explained the situation three times, I was assured that they would address my concerns with The Resort and get back to me.  In each conversation I suggested that they certainly had encountered many stories about Mexican timeshares similar to mine; I got no argument.  They never did get back to me but instead turned the matter over to a collection agency in San Diego, Resort Recovery Solutions.  I am providing them with copies of all emails and this post and to date, they have been very cooperative.  There will be additional posts on the collection activity.  What happens is that The Resort transfers its illicit contract paper to US affiliates who then try to wash it under the US laws and courts as they go about the collecting process.

The long and short of this saga is these people gather the  critical information about you, promptly share it with one another and then create a sales pitch that would appear to address all concerns and make the deal too good to pass up.  The problem is that the pitch is a carefully crafted and smoothly presented ruse that involves intentional and fraudulent misrepresentations and absolute fabrications designed specifically to induce the customers detrimental reliance thereon and get a signature on the bottom line at all costs.  They believe they can hide behind inferior Mexican law and get away with it in this country.  In some cases I suppose they do but that is not going to happen in this case.

I ask all of you reading this to let me hear from you regarding your negative experiences at this resort or any other in Mexico.  These recounts of fraudulent timeshare experiences must be published on complaint sites, Facebook, Twitter, and on travel company websites.  The reason that others are so frequently duped is that the truths about the tactics of these tag team sales people are not published.  Stay tuned folks, there will be much more!!