Complaint Review: Vacation Village Voyages

This "business" is probably legal but certainly is of questionable value.

The condo vacation "bargains" are not all that great. If you shop around, you can usually find the same or similar prices elsewhere. What the salesperson won't tell you is that most of the low prices are for off-season rentals when the resorts are nearly empty and are begging for customers. Depending upon location, the weather might be terrible. Want to stay in a resort during the tourist season? You won't find any bargains here!

The VacationVillageVoyages.com web site for airline fares, cruises, and other vacation travel is simply a customized page that displays information from some other travel service, even though the top of the page says "VacationVillageVoyages.com." You can find exactly the same prices on Travelocity,com, Kayak.com, Expedia.com and most any other travel web site. If you shop around, you can often find better prices somewhere else, although not always. All of the other travel web sites seem to have exactly the same prices and they don't charge a membership fee. The cruise ship web sites often have lower prices than does VacationVillageVoyages.com and, again, without membership fees.

There's nothing special about the prices on VacationVillageVoyages.com despite all the sales propaganda from the (highly compensated) sales person.

In return, you are signing up for a multi-year membership that is (1.) rather expensive considering it gives prices that are the same as all the free web sites and (2.) non-cancelable. You are locked into paying this outrageous membership fee for years.

The sales pitch was slanted and misleading. We were told of all the "wonderful bargains" available on VacationVillageVoyages.com. So far, we haven't found a single price there for airfares or cruises that was cheaper than Travelocity,com, Kayak.com, Expedia.com or the others. The prices for condo/timeshare rentals vary but you can often find the same prices if you go directly to the web site of the condo or timeshare. The "bargains" on VacationVillageVoyages.com aren't bargains at all.

If you try to cancel your membership, you are told that you cannot.

Customer service is almost non-existant. They are open only during business hours on the East Coast and even then you often get recorded messages saying "ll agents are busy serving other customers."

If you get delayed by an airline or by bad weather, you are still required to pay the full fee for all the nights you reserved. Notice that you have to pay in advance and then hope that things work out. In my case, a hurricane grounded all flights for three days on one of my trips. I was refused a refund of the money I had paid in advance. After making multiple phone calls, I was eventually told, "It's not our fault that a hurricane disrupted things."

The quality of the resorts vary. Some are top notch, some are not. A few are very run down, dirty, and in need of repairs. At one place I stayed at, the on-site restaurant that was advertised on the web site as providing gourmet dining had been closed for six months with no other restaurants within walking distance. Of course, the web site never mentioned that.

My girlfriend and I fell for the sales pitch even though a nagging internal voice kept telling me "It's a rip-off." A year after signing up, I tried to cancel my membership but after listening to recordings several times when I called customer service, I finally got through to a live person who told me that I had signed a nonrefundable multi-year agreement.

If you sign up for Vacation Village Voyages, all I can say to you is "Good luck!"