Complaint Review: Royal Holiday Club

I want to express my extreme frustration with Royal Holiday Club's deceptive, fraudulent, and predatory sales practices.

I would like help in taking steps to cancel my contract with Royal Holiday. The money I've wasted in payments is a secondary concern, but I would like to recover any of it I can. I would also like to do my part in closing down this unethical company once and for all.

Over the past two years I have been obliged to pay some $7,300 to Royal Holiday but received no net benefit, as I explain below.

My wife and I were scammed with a deceptive high-pressure sale at the Wyndham in Nassau in March 2011. Having second thoughts, 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--which disappeared completely by the time we needed them.

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 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 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 2005.

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 desperate need to break away. Is there anything I can do?

Thanking you for any help you can give.