Complaint Review: PTP Travel - Issaquah Washington

Beware if you receive a promo offer from PTP travel, Issaquah, WA, (a.k.a., Pennies To Paradise). They send out postcards promising free airfares along with hotel stays if you call 1-888-639-6990 and mention their promo code AAIS-0104. You are then told, in order to claim the gifts, you and your spouse must attend their 90 minute sales presentation for a travel club, American Travel Planners (ATP). During the presentation, a PTP salesperson is assigned to each couple and pressures them to sign up for the ATP club at an exorbitant up front fee which starts at $11k and gradually goes down to $2k as you resist. And this up front fee does not even include the annual fee for belonging to ATP. If you resist till the end, they do not give you the promo gift as promised, but instead, give you a certificate you must exchange for the travel tickets. This certificate, issued by Millennium Travel & Promotions, is a scam in itself. If you do an internet search you will find several posts on how that scam works. A good description of how that scam works is at this site: ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Millennium_Travel_and_Promotions_legit ).

I suspect ATP is a scam as well, though I could not find very much information on them. It is probably because their internet web site has only been in existence since October 2012 (probably not enough time for people who have been suckered into the club to know it yet). Their web site is a slick presentation, but if you examine it closely you should notice there is no information as to who the corporate entity is, nor where physically it is located. But, by researching the internet, you soon find a connection with Andrew Wunder of Sea To Ski Vacations LLC, Broomfield, Colorado. If you do an internet search on Sea To Ski Vacations, you will find they are involved in several travel scams.

Getting back to PTP, I suspect they are a scam operation as well. They do not use their corporate identity in their dealings with the public, but rather an acronym composed of the initials of the corporate name; I presume so that the public has a harder time in finding out just who they really are. During their presentation (which is held at a local hotel/inn) they lie about their offices and how long they have been doing business in the area. If you ask for a business card, what you get is their address & phone crudely printed on a regular sheet of paper. It lists their address as being 4580 Klahanie Dr SE PMB 514, Issaquah, WA 98029 and phone as (425) 457-0449. Their address is nothing more than a postal mail box that could easily be changed if the heat gets too hot.

I suspect all these people & businesses operating these travel scams just keep changing their names and identities as their scams are exposed. But, it is vital for the public to expose their scams on sites like Ripoff Reports as soon as they appear. It may prevent many people from becoming victims of the fraud. Please do your part in exposing these and similar scams by posting relevant information to internet sites that others can find during their search.