Our first visit to Mexico and our first timeshare presentation turned out to be a horror story for our family. The Sunset Group has almost $16,000 of our money, which was given as a deposit towards a timeshare on June 29th 2006. We tried to cancel in July and get a refund because we believe we were grossly deceived. But they have been unwilling to refund any money, even though the American Embassy in Mexico has been negotiating with them. This is a huge amount of money for my family to lose.

We were persuaded to purchase a 2 week master suite for $60,000. Our salespeople, Monica Mirica and Lorena Gonzalez told us we were investing in property that would appreciate every year. It seemed like a good investment. On July 28th, I paid for a Timeshare Market Valuation by “Vacation Timeshare and Rentals”, which placed the actual value of my contract at $17,230.

Monica verbally “guaranteed” many times that Sunset would buy back our contract after one year if we were not satisfied. She said it was a “no risk investment”. I have asked Sunset to honor that commitment, but they say it is not written in the contract, so they will not honor it.

They added 6 “VIP” weeks and told us they could be rented out for $1,700 a week profit. At $10,200 profit per year, they said I could repay my initial investment within 6 years.

My research strongly suggests that this is not true. In fact, you can rent weeks on eBay and the TimeShare Users Group (TUG) for much less than the maintenance fee. There is a lot of useful information about buying and renting timeshares on the TUG Website.

Unfortunately for me, I did not have time to review my contract immediately as I had to fly to the UK to attend my stepfather’s funeral. He died on the same morning that we signed the contract yet Sunset has shown no compassion to us despite our emotional distress that day.

They promised the presentation would be 90 minutes, but it lasted over 6 hours. Not only did we lose our money and our peace of mind, it spoiled our entire vacation and I have spent many hours trying to get the contract canceled. The presentation was designed to induce our trust, and to this day we still cannot believe the salespeople could deliberately tell us what we believe were lies so convincingly, so many times.

I am pursuing a full refund and I will never give up. I want as many people as possible to know the truth about the Sunset Group.

Thank you for reading this.