At that point, I was getting out of the Army and about to start law school, so money was more import

That’s email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa what I was thinking when I received the flowery marketing letter and brochure from Ramada. They were offering a 7 night vacation for 2, a car rental, and a cruise from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa (and back, even!) for $595. A week’s vacation for two for $595! I couldn’t believe it. I read on, being ever skeptical that I was seeing the vacation equivalent of chart porn .
Somewhere deep down in the sales brochure was a little itty bitty paragraph about having to sit through a 2 hour timeshare presentation (or, as they put it, “vacation email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa ownership email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa opportunity”) as well as sending in the check or credit card to pay for the trip.
At that point, I was getting out of the Army and about to start law school, so money was more important than time. Two hours of sales pitches and $595 for a week-long vacation for two? That was a reasonable price to pay!
Since we were living the lives of a college student (I the student, she the sufferer) and I was still fighting off the hangover of my more profligate credit card habits , we had to do a cheap honeymoon. I won the discussion.
As the University of Colorado’s Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren show, humor is derived when the situation is a benign violation . If the situation involves minor pain, then it must be recent to be funny (I stubbed my toe a few minutes ago). If the situation involves significant amounts of pain, then the pain must be in the distant past to be funny.
When we flew into the Fort Lauderdale airport, picking up the car was a breeze. We followed the directions and got to the Ramada. It was straight out of 1968. Vintage old-school hotel with all of the doors facing the outside. It looked like the type of place that Jesse Pinkman email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa from Breaking Bad would use to conduct a meth deal. We were a little skeptical. At least the car worked and was full of gas, so we used it to drive around Fort Lauderdale for a couple of days and only stayed in the hotel when we absolutely had to.
On the third day, we were required to attend the timeshare presentation. We drove out to the middle of nowhere. I was surprised, because Florida is only so wide from east to west, but we somehow found the most physically remote spot to drive to from Fort Lauderdale email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa and still be in the state. There was a half-completed complex, a sales center, and a pool. We parked and went in.
The sales center was like a very fancy reception room. There were soda machines everywhere. We filled up on Cokes (this was back in the days when I actually sent those acid bombs down my gullet) and sat down and waited for our turn. Pretty soon, a guy came and picked us up and drove us to one of the buildings where the model was so that we could get our tour.
When I was a kid, we used to go down to Florida for family vacations about every other year. We always rented a condo and stuffed four generations of family into it. If you’ve ever been in your standard Florida condominium, then you know what they look like.
This one was no different, except email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa that it had been built in 2001 instead of 19 fiftysomething. It was nothing special, and it was out in the Middle of Nowhere, Florida. I’m sure the zip code was a negative number.
The condo was part of RCI, which is, from what I gathered, the world’s largest timeshare owner. This condo was part of whatever the highest category RCI had, which meant that if we didn’t want to take our one week vacation in Middle of Nowhere, Florida (zip code: -39481.99), email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa we could trade and let some other person stay there while we went to timeshares in all sorts of exotic places.
This had the feeling of a television infomercial where before they get you to dial the number to purchase your mop squeezer or whatever the ShamWow dude is selling, they say, “but wait! There’s more!” email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa Hey, ShamWow dude – if what you’re selling is so great, why do you have to load it with a bunch of extras?
A timeshare is a fractional lease on a piece of property. You buy the right to use that property for a certain amount of time every year – usually a week – at the same time every year, e.g. the 14th week of the year, the 28th week, etc. Random strangers with unknown cleanliness habits get to use the property email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa the other 51 weeks out of the year. You pay a certain amount for that fractional right, and then you also pay a maintenance or upkeep fee for them to keep your property spic and span so that, if you bought week number 14, the denizens of week number 13 don’t infect you with their germs and bacteria. It also saves you from having to pay your fractional property taxes, fractional insurance, and the like.
For this particular email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa property where we were located (and wondering if we could figure out, using published topographical maps, how to get back to our hotel without sinking into the Okefenokee swamp), we soon found out the price. The salesman showed email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa us every possible high point of the condo, email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa like flushing toilets, running water, and working electricity, and had us admire email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa the view of a, what he assured email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa us, soon to be completed golf course. Then, he took us back to the sales center, or the epicenter of every high pressure closing pitch known to mankind (related: what can salespeople learn from 419 scammers ).
The price was $18,000. However, we could put down $2,500 on a credit card and put the rest on a 15 year mortgage at the low, low, low interest rate of 15.9% (which was, from what I recall, higher than what our credit card interest rate was).
Oh, and he mentioned in an aside, the maintenance fee was $900 a year, but we could put that on the credit card too. And if we wanted to use RCI for another property instead of the fine one where we were presently lost located, we’d have to pay another $350.
By that point, the manager had dropped the price to $2,500 and told us that we could put everything on the credit card, disregarding the inconvenient fact that I was in business and law school and had no job aside from an internship.
Research shows that we’re happier having less money and being richer than our neighbors than if we have more money and have less money than our neighbors . The same goes with cruise ships. We had no idea how big cruise ships were supposed to be, and this ship was much bigger than the rowboats I’d previously been on, so it looked huge. We were happy. Until, that is, the next afternoon, when we were scheduled to leave Nassau. When we pulled into the dock, we were the only cruise ship there, so we maintained our illusion about how huge the ship was. When we left, all of the other, real cruise ships had pulled in, buffeting our little bathtub toy about in the wake.
But, I digress. Having been saved from my own Monkey Brain by my wife’s threats of an instant divorce and potential violence against either email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa me or the manager at the timeshare sales center, I started feeling good about our her decision to say no. Buoyed by this confidence, I decided that a great icebreaker at the dinner table on the cruise ship would be this line.
This was a smart play on the part of the timeshare people. They waited until 2.5 days had elapsed before getting everyone together, and when they were all together, they were in international waters, where making phone calls was VERY difficult.
Because Monkey Brain wanted to be right. If they didn’t cancel the timeshare, then their actions would imply that it was the right decision to make. Cognitive dissonance kicked in, and they started telling themselves a narrative that it must have been the right decision because they didn’t cancel the timeshare.
A few years later, we were staying at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. We were approached by a salesperson who said that we could get $50 each of food vouchers if we sat through a timeshare presentation. Since, by then, we knew that I wasn’t going to get suckered into anything, we accepted. The woman took us into the sales center and showed us the model of the Planet Hollywood timeshare. We agreed to everything and didn’t ask questions. We looked enthusiastic, email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa even as she took us outside in the 110 degree blistering heat to show us the outside of the building despite the fact that we’d just driven up to the hotel from the airport a mere two hours ago. We oohed and aahed and acted as if we couldn’t wait to put pen to paper.
“But but ” she stammered as she tried to figure out where the deal had gone wrong. We were such obvious marks, such easy money. Flustered, she didn’t even try the other tricks and went to get her manager.
You shouldn’t pay rack rate to buy a timeshare . A quick search on any timeshare reseller site will show you tons of listings for under $1,500. That’s less than 10% of the price that the salesperson initially quoted us 12 years ago . Real estate only goes up, right? Not in this case. It’s more like a horrible case of value depreciation when you drive the new car off the lot.
You can rent a condo for about the same price, and get flexibility in both location and time . Why go to the same place over and over again every year? Even if you want to go to the same place, are you going to go on the 24th week of the year every year? What if a kid gets sick or there’s a key deadline at work? If you own a timeshare, it’s sad trombone time. Buying a timeshare decimates your vacation real options .
The other RCI properties aren t much better . I took some time to pore over a RCI catalog a couple of years back. Since I love international travel , I figured I might as well check out the RCI properties in international locations. It turns out that almost every property I looked at was something like 45 minutes outside of the city. That s great if you want to get away from it all, but if you re going to Cape Town to see the city, it s pretty email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa inconvenient to be stuck 45 minutes away from what you want to see, especially when you can get cheaper, equivalent accommodation (try de Waterkant) in a central location.
email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa Better yet, rent the timeshare from some other poor sucker who owns it and can’t use it! Major kudos to Bryan Marsden email addresses of airline ticket booking in usa f