Complaint Review: Grand Mayan - Nuevo Vallarta Internet

Just wanted to share our bad experience with the time share we bought from the Grand Mayan,  Nuevo Vallarta last August 27, 2012.  Sharing this so other people out there who intend of buying a time share will be cautioned.

It all started with a Grand Mayan receptionist offering a free breakfast, a tour of the place and attending a 90 minute presentation. By attending the presentation you will be given some free gifts like a 2000 peso credit to your hotel account and some restaurant discounts.  Along with this, they will also ask you to fill up a form which is also asking if you have a major credit card.  They will also ask you for 200 dollars deposit which they promise to give back after the presentation.    

During the presentation, we had been offered a timeshare worth USD 22,400.  Part of this,  we had been promised by the sales rep (Sergio and his manager)that our existing WorldMark time share is going to be sold by their Grand Mayan  Property Manager for USD 35,700 (assessed value).  In addition to that, they will also buy our recently bought Puerto Bahia time share (just bought a day before that presentation day) for USD 14,000.  So in the end, after we get the monies for the two time share, we will still have a profit since the Grand Mayan timeshare is only worth USD 22,400. We thought this was a good deal so we decided to buy the Mayan timeshare. By the way all this calculations/computations are in a piece of paper(worksheet) which they refuse to give back to us in the end.  

The rep then told us that their property manager will call us oremail us once we get back to Canada. He said just wait for the property manager.

And so the sale was done that day. We gave them a down payment of US 6,720.  By the way, that 90 minute presentation turned out to be 4-5 hours and that during the sale they also did not mention about the 5 day cancellation option.  The sales rep was very thankful and even gave us his phone # and email address.

Then one week after we came back to Canada, we were wondering why we never had a call or email from this property manager.  We then called up the sales rep using his contact details.  Then we discovered that the phone number was disconnected. Emailed him twice but no reply was received.

We then called up Mayan member services and looked for Sergio. Member services confirmed that he was still working there. So why is he not contacting us?  Then we inquired with Member Services about this Property Manager who was supposed to contact us. Member services tells us that there is no such property manager and we are responsible for selling our time shares by contacting a reseller from their timeshare reseller listing. That really broke our hearts afterwards.   

And then I searched for various Timeshare resellers to know the real market value of our WorldMark timeshare and apparently its only around US 6000 or less.  This made us realize that we had been deceived by the manager and sales rep.  That Mayan USD 35,700 appraisal was really a grossly inflated amount.  

Got more curious and researched the net for some more info to see if other people had the same experience about the Mayan.  Its true we are not the only one deceived:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/mayan-palace-vacatio/resorts/mayan-palace-vacation-club-vid-30c53.htm

http://boards.independenttraveler.com/showthread.php?12967-Caught-In-Mayan-Palace-SCAM

http://grupo-mayan.pissedconsumer.com/grand-mayan-nuevo-vallarta-timeshare-sales-fraud-20100509181500.html

http://www.ripoffreport.com/lodging/grand-mayan/grand-mayan-vida-vacations-a-1bae6.htm

http://www.ripoffreport.com/directory/grand-mayan.aspx

http://www.ripoffreport.com/grand-mayan/resorts/nuevo-vallarta-internet-0946c.htm

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/mayan_resorts.html

http://complaintwire.org/complaint/3YcBAAAAAAA/mayan-palace/4

As I mentioned,  a day before we went to that Mayan presentation, we did bought a timeshare from Puerto Bahia.  During the Mayan presentation, the sales rep and manager said that they are going to buy this from us for US 14,000.  Im still curious as to what happened to this timeshare. During the presentation they asked us to sign something on this. I asked the sales rep twice about whats going to happen to it and he said dont worry about it, well take care of that. You dont need to continue paying for that.  If it was cancelled by Mayan for us (since it's under the cooling off  5 day cancellation) then I think our US 2000 down payment for that should be refunded to us.  But during the presentation, they said they will buy it from us. I dont know, Im still confused on that.

Lastly,  part of the package incentive was an option for us to sell our weeks for a guaranteed USD1600/week. We were delighted to hear this as this will help us pay off our Mayan timeshare in the end. I havent started contacting timeshare resellers about this at all but by reading the links above which complains about this as well,  I now know what to expect of this. This is another deceiving information.

Right now we are really frustrated as the promises we are expecting from the presentation were all lies and deceiving information.  Yesterday I had emailed Mayan member services about this and had requested for a full refund and cancellation.  I am waiting to hear from them.

So anyways, thank you Ripoffreport.com for giving me a chance to share my experience. More power to your website.  This Grand Mayan experience brought us a lot of stress and grief. I will never forget this. Never will I go back to Mexico again because of this experience.

So for all you Canadians out there like myself and those of you there thinking of buying from the Grand Mayan, please learn from my experience. Never believe all promises Time share sales reps are saying; only believe promises when they are legally written.