Complaint Review: Wyndham Vacation Resorts/Ownership - San Antonio Texas

On 18 Aug 2007 my wife and I went to a Wyndham sales office in San Antonio to sit in on a time share sales presentation in exchange for some incentives. During the presentation we spoke with Nicholas Peterson and we decided that timeshare ownership wasnt for us. However his bosses were very persistent in selling us a timeshare plan. We eventually purchased a biennial contract with the understanding that the timeshare would appreciate in value. It wasnt until later in that we discovered this was a lie and what we purchased was almost useless.

On May 14th of 2008, my wife and I attended a dinner party hosted by Wyndham Vacation Resorts at the Sheraton Gunther hotel in downtown San Antonio. After dinner everyone was split off into couples so that Wyndham could provide us with updates to our ownership. We were introduced to Mr. Michael Suarez who we were told would be our representative to help with any questions regarding our ownership and update us on new programs for Wyndham owners. Mr. Suarez was not introduced as a salesman; it wasnt until later that we discovered that the dinner party was nothing more than a sales pitch put on by Wyndham to lure people into buying more points in their program.

During the OWNERSHIP UPDATE Mr. Suarez told us that we did not have enough points to use our timeshare as we had previously purchased a biennial contract with Wyndham. From our original purchase we understood that our biennial contract would allow us to have a certain number of points with Wyndham to use over the course of two years. But according to Mr. Suarez, by not having enough points we were ineligible for many of the benefits within Wyndham like Wyndhams Extra Holidays rental income program. He made it sound like we had been sold an inferior package the first time and he wanted to help us get better value from our ownership.

Mr. Suarez promised us that he would personally help us rent our points. He boasted about how he had rented some of his points which covered the expenses he incurred when purchasing some new home entertainment equipment amounting to over $2000. Mr. Suarez explained that if we purchased additional points to reach the next level of ownership and by using Extra Holidays that we could actually (with his assistance) have the program cover our monthly maintenance fees of $73.71 and repay the $15,600 for this second purchase.

Mr. Suarez wrote all this out on paper and explained it in great detail and provided us with his personal cell phone number to reach him at anytime and he would answer any questions we had. By the time he had us sign the contract it was after midnight, we were totally exhausted and just ready to leave. At the time of signing the contract Mr. Suarez and his notary told us that we needed to back date and sign the document otherwise we couldnt buy into the next level of ownership. This created what we later realized was a false sense of urgency - there really was no reason to hurry us up. However, having been given what seemed like a reasonable explanation at the time, we back dated the document and left. Looking back on all this, the explanation was dubious at best, we feel like this was just another reason to hurry us up so they could get us to sign the contract.

Future attempts at calling Mr. Suarez were of little help and the Wyndham Extra Holidays rental income program did not cover any of the costs as promised. If Mr. Suarez had not intentionally lied to us and purposely misled us, we would not have bought anything that night. Instead we remember Mr. Suarez making the purchase of the additional points sound like a no brainer being that it would pay for itself, PLUS we could eventually make some money with our ownership like Mr. Suarez claimed to have done.

On May 31, 2009, my wife and I were staying at the Wyndham La Cascada resort. While staying there we had some questions about our now $28,198 timeshare and how we could more effectively use what we had already purchased. We made an appointment with Wyndhams member services to go over our membership.

At our appointed time we went down to member services desk and were introduced to Mr. Abel Michael Rosenberg who, after he specifically and intentionally misrepresented to us that he was not a salesman, told us that we should have been contacted about the new Wyndham programs and that we were missing out on financial benefits that were currently being enjoyed by other timeshare owners who had been notified. He said that he could not understand WHY we had not been notified but that he would now go over everything with us and try to get us to a point where we could use our timeshare more effectively. He said that we needed to be at the gold level of 500,000 points to take full benefit of the program. He explained what we would need to do to get there and he would help us with any questions that we might have in using any of the Wyndham programs, like the Extra Holidays rental program that Mr. Suarez had sold us. Having just heard this sales pitch a while back we were very reluctant to purchase again.

Then Mr. Rosenberg with Mr. Matthew Gutierrez closed the deal by promising us that Wyndham was starting a buy-back program and would purchase back our property if we kept it for two years provided that we had an offer from a buyer (which could be anyone) and we could make money on the deal. We asked WHY Wyndham would do this and they said that at the 308,000 point level that Wyndham would rather resell our property themselves than to have it out on the open market. To help us use our timeshare they BOTH promised to personally help us manage our points and provided us with their personal cell phone numbers to call at any time. This sounded like a great offer so we purchased the additional points, thinking we would try for two more years to get value from our ownership, comforted in knowing that we would have an out after that time. If still unsatisfied, we were relieved to hear that we would be able to sell our full ownership back to Wyndham, which would allow us to recoup our investment and hopefully some of our expenses and to get out of the Wyndham timeshare completely as we have not benefited from it as we were originally told we would. We now believe they told us this so that we would not rescind the contract within the required deadline.

Back in October we had an interested buyer for our property, so on 15 October 2010 we placed a call to Wyndhams Transfer of Ownership section (866-812-9798). We inquired about the buyback program and discovered that Wyndham does NOT have such a program. Therefore two more employees of Wyndham resorts; Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Gutierrez intentionally lied to us and purposely misled us just to get us to sign another contract and purchase more points with Wyndham. This was done to secure the execution of the document under the deception that Wyndham would buy back our time share after two years.

We would like to believe that the deceptive selling practices of Wyndham Vacation Resorts was limited to the San Antonio office but we also were invited to a Wyndham Party Weekend which we attended in Cancun Mexico back in March of 2008 where we met a group of Wyndham representatives from Las Vegas Nevada. Our assigned representative was Mr. Ben Nethery, a VIP Portfolio Manager, who also attempted to convince us to purchase Wyndham property in Las Vegas and made many of the same claims (on papers still in our possession) that the San Antonio representatives did that we now know are not true. We did not purchase as we were not interested in Las Vegas. Given that these same lies are being sold in different markets, we are convinced that this is part of the Wyndham training given to their representatives, therefore is being driven from the top down.