On 11-22-10 I bought a Wyndham Bonnet Creek timeshare from a company that buys and sells timeshares. On 12-9-10 the deed was taken to Bonnet Creek for the change in ownership. I contacted them several times to find out when my ownership would take effect. I was assured that the points (126, 000) were in the account and I would be able to use them when the name change was completed. After numerous phone calls about my membership, I flew to Orlando (from California) to find out what was happening with my account. On 1-24-11 I went to Bonnet Creek to see their units and find out about my membership. The salesman asked what I paid for the timeshare and when I told him, he was shocked and said there was no record of my membership. When I got back to my hotel I called them and was told that my deed was "invalid". They said it had improper wording, but refused to tell me what was wrong. I contacted the company I bought it from and they corrected the "wording" and turned the corrected deed back in. After numerous phone calls about my membership status, I received a bill in the mail for my yearly maintenance fees of $662.87. I immediately paid the bill in full. Four days later I received their "Welcome" letter stating that I did not have any points for 2010 or 2011. I called them and they said the previous owner used the points for 2010 and borrowed the points from 2011 and there were no points left in the account. I asked how that could be when I had a legal document in front of me with their signatures relinquishing all rights, uses, etc. as of 4-10-10. One employee that I spoke with eluded to the fact that the previous owners had made the reservations sometime after the first of the year. I asked how they could give away my points and kept being told over and over that I wasn't a member until 3-18-11 and, therefore, the previous owner had the right to use the points. I was told to email the document I had where the previous owners had relinquished all rights to the timeshare and was told they would contact me in 3 days. The representative said that they wouldn't give me the points back because the previous owner had the right and it didn't matter that they had my deed in their hands for 4 months prior to changing the name. I have made a complaint with the Florida Office of Consumer Affairs and the Orange County DA's Office. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. I don't intend to let this matter drop.

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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 Wyndham’s 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 couldn’t 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 Wyndham’s 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 Wyndham’s “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.

In April, 2006, in Atlantic City, NJ, we were approached by people offering free gifts to go to a 90-minute timeshare presentation. We were told that we would be making one of the best investments possible as a young couple.

In actuality we were taken advantage of because we were a young and inexperienced couple who were led to believe by high-pressure sales tactics, that this purchase was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that rates would go up if we did not purchase today. Also that this was such a great deal we would be crazy not to take advantage of it as prices would go up drastically because timeshares were so popular.

In order to create a false sense of urgency, they said they "were willing to cut the price to make it more affordable and manageable for our budget, when they knew it was going to be a severe burden. Not only were we going to be shelling out the max we could afford to spend on a down payment, but also be paying a good chunk of both our paychecks each month to cover the various fees associated with the purchase.

Many benefits we were promised would come with our membership, turned out to be misrepresented and impossible to use. The sales rep said he would be our personal representative for anything we needed. We could never reach him when we tried. We were also promised how easy it would be for them to rent out our timeshare and, we could make enough money to pay the maintenance fees plus enough to mostly pay our loan amount.

They tried to pressure us into buying more time. When we refused, the rep became rude, relentless, and unprofessional by cursing at us. We were also harassed and badgered during "owner update" meetings at the timeshare site to purchase more, leaving us confused and frustrated. Any questions we raised were dismissed and we were assured we were doing the right thing. We crumbled under the high pressure sales tactics and are now paying for it both monetarily and emotionally.

After we signed papers, they were taken away to be signed by another party. Upon review of the document we cannot find the printed name, only a scribbled signature. The document we signed was only two pages--the final document was much larger and we didn't have the opportunity to study the larger document. Later we spoke to someone on the phone about our dissatisfaction and were told that a buy-back program was in the works and we could look into that in the future. Anyone we brought it up to later said there was no such thing.

In March 2010, we stayed at their resort at Shawnee, PA, and invited to an "owners update" with Krista Gaston. We soon realized we were in a high-pressure sales situation disguised with friendly smiles and stories by various "friendly" associates, which only served to distract us from what we were actually doing.

Krista said, “what a great investment we had made” and then we were pressured to purchase at Shawnee. We told them that a purchase of a second timeshare would be a severe financial burden. Their response was that we could use the other timeshare as collateral and would pay minimally per month. Also, they would open a “personal line of credit” at Bank of America for us so that we could pay off the old one with this new credit.

The badgering and high-pressure sales tactics were heavy. With assistance from other associates, we were being badgered and harassed. At this point, we were confused and frustrated, and in that state of mind, allowed the salesperson to lead us by the hand to fill out each document, assuring us at each step that we were doing the right thing. They dismissed any questions we raised. During the signing process, several people were talking so that we were unable to concentrate on what we were doing or given opportunity to review the documents.

Later, a credit card came in the mail that we did not want. If we had known we were getting a credit card, we would have refused and not purchased this timeshare. We did not receive a copy of a signed credit card application with our documents.

They promised that we could make money by renting out our units and that our personal representative, Krista, would do the work for us. In actuality, we were never able to reach Krista or anyone else to take or return our calls, even though we had been assured they would act in our behalf. The only contact they made to us was by mail that the maintenance fees were going up.

We crumbled under high-pressure sales tactics and are now paying for it both monetarily and emotionally. We made this purchase by being connived and cajoled; we were too trusting of their promises. We would like nothing more than to give them back the timeshare and get a refund.