Complaint Review: Holiday Inn - Orlando Florida

In September of 2018, I received notice of a "new member's meeting” that would be held at Canyon Lake Hill Country Resort, San Marcos, TX.  This meeting was to help new owners understand how the timeshare works and answer any questions that we may have.  

The pictures of the location were very pretty and I thought it would be a nice trip, as my husband had recently starting having health issues, but mainly because I didn't understand how everything worked when it came to using the points, especially, how to trade them when the resort isn't owned by Holiday Inn.   

I paid $199.00 over the phone for the reservation for our three day, two night stay.  Upon checking in, we had to pay an additional, unexpected fee of $19.90. The two bedroom, two bath condo was right on the corner by the entrance of the resort with a "great" view of the office entrance.  The lake was nowhere in sight.  The outdoor deck was right on the front of the condo, meaning that every car that came and went, passed right by us, giving no privacy whatsoever. 

Inside, the condo had obviously just undergone renovations, we saw several places that had been left unpainted, the light switches were in odd places and hard to find, the tv was not easy to turn on and the phone did not work, meaning if we had a question or an emergency, we would have to go to the front desk. The towel bars in the bathrooms fell off the wall with the slightest touch, and the smoke alarm wouldn't have worked if the place had been on fire, because all it did was chirp very loudly for a very long time. We did go to the front desk about the chirping but because we couldn't get anyone to replace the battery in it, we finally removed the battery ourselves.   

There was no coffee maker in the room.  We walked to the front desk and were told someone would bring a coffee machine right over.  It never happened so on the last morning that we were there, we walked back to the office and stood there until they went and found a coffee pot. We attempted to eat at the restaurant at the resort and were greeted with the same soured service as the front desk, very underwhelming. It was literally one of the worst meals we have ever eaten. 

One evening while we were attempting to enjoy the night air on the deck where all of the traffic seemingly passed by, a woman was shouting as if she were in trouble. The room phone didn’t work, and the internet and cell phone service was so bad we couldn’t get a call to connect so we went to the front desk for help. After pounding on an office door a security guard emerged and then went to see what was going on. He later reported it was a domestic dispute and that it had been “handled”. The lack of response and aid was astonishing as if we had had a real emergency the attempt to get help would have been futile and fatal. 

We were scheduled for our meeting the day after we arrived.  We had no idea where the meeting was to be held, and went to the main office, thinking it would be there.  They gave us written instructions on how to get to the meeting.  After driving all over the resort, we went back to the office for verbal instructions.  Come to find out, the meeting wasn't even at the resort.  We went to a building that had no signs or indication it could be the right place. Once we went inside, a very bubbly and happy woman showed us through a display of several pictures of locations that were available to stay. Of course, the more points you owned, the more beautiful the resorts with tons of amenities.  She also showed us some graphs and charts that were not too different from the ones in the book that we had been given when we bought the timeshare.

As it ends up, that was the extent of the “training” on how to use our points. 

This was not a "New Member's Meeting".  The lady pushed us to buy more points and after I emphatically told her NO, we would NOT buy more because we didn't want to buy the one that we had, she became sullen and almost rude.  

Needless to say, we did not enjoy our trip to San Marcos! We are bringing this incident to the attention of the managers and supervisors as we went with the intention of being educated on how to use the timeshare not buy more points. We feel that it was false advertising and want to be given the information we came for which is how to make the points work for us. We don’t need more points to learn how to use the points we have. We want the information we came for to know how to use what we have. Holiday Inn has not reached out to us regarding our experience or our requests for the information. They have called us multiple times a day regarding payments.