RCI and AM Resorts (Unlimited Vacation Club)

[81sparkle Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close 81sparkle]

Unlimited Vacation Club

For anyone out there that did get some money back from this company, could you please tell me what steps you followed to do so. I would appreciate any help you might be able to send my way. This has been a nightmare experience. The only (and I repeat ONLY) ray of hope is that my husband and I were not the only ones that experienced this horrible company and someone might be able to advise us on what to do. The people of UVC lie and go around in circles when you contact them.

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

Most vacation clubs are bad deals. If you want to get into timesharing, buy a fixed week at a resort that trades well. Also it is better to buy at a member-controlled resort than a developer-controlled resort, so you know that management decisions will be on a member-friendly basis.

eBay is the bargain basement of timesharing, as far as a cheap place to buy. You may also find some decent weeks posted as freebies on this site.

[blackdot54 Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close blackdot54]

To anyone thinking about joining Unlimited Vacations Club with RCI, IT IS A SCAM! DO NOT DO IT.

My wife and I were invited for a breakfast where they immediately started offering us booze and Champaign before they sat us down to start the cult like brainwashing about how they are offering the greatest and unbelievable vacation club out there. I am a very skeptical person and therefore asked all the questions most people would ask, what’s the catch? What are the blackout dates? What restrictions? And to that they told me only what I wanted to hear but at the end of the day, it was all a bunch of lies. To make things worse, they’re serving you alcohol the entire time you’re doing the paperwork, and then they ask you to sign a piece of paper stating that you are not under the influence of alcohol. To anyone thinking about signing up, take this as your moment to get out of it. You’re not thinking clearly. They should be shut down for being allowed to provide such contracts in the presence of alcohol.

Now as we try and make use of this membership which we have paid many thousands for, we’re bounced around by their call staff, they have lousy hours so we can’t get hold of them and they come back with outrageous pricing which is not at all what was promised to us during our original meeting. They also asked us what we typically pay for a vacation and we can’t price anything even with the club discount to come anywhere close. Not worth it.

Again I say, it is a SCAM through and through. We are currently trying to get our money back but it is a colossal pain in the ass. To anyone that has been successful, please send me a PM and let me know what you did.

[chanou74 Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close chanou74]

UVC : how to divorce ...?

We did end up getting a refund after months of emails, phone calls and documentation. I began posting our experience as well, this may have helped. Post your experience on all of the travel sites, you will probably get a better response. I am a lawyer and my husband is a doctor. We are experienced travelers and we still got duped! They made it sound like a perfect club and said everything we wanted to hear. The very first time we used the membership, it was the worst vacation we ever had. We had invited two other families as well and they experienced the "benefits" of UVC. Let's just say they will NEVER join. We were lied to on the phone about what upgrade we would get if we booked a certain room. When we arrived the room was available nd the resort would not give it to us. We were even mocked at and lied to from the by the front desk staff and management. We called the Miami office and they said the room was available, that was the upgrade our membership entitled us to and they had no clue why the resort would not honor the upgrade. BUT, UVC could not make them do it! What? Yes we were confused. UVC was selling the memberships but could not honor the membership if the resort chose not to! We dealt with this for 3 days of our vacation before we gave up. We were DOWNGRADED and told it was an upgrade. Yes, we were moved into a less expensive room. Actually, we were moved twice. We never received the upgrade. We gave up so our kids and the other families would not be affected by the negativity that was occurring. I posted our experience and all of the lies we were told on several websites. We did end up getting a refund after several months. I know my husband called multiple times and I had emails to different people I was told to contact. It seems like we were both always given different names every time we emailed or called. Just stick with it and keep trying to get your money back. You can get better rates most of the time on bookedit.com and cheapcarribean.com for the same resorts. Although they say they will beat those rates they don't because you loose the package benefit of getting the better airfare rates from bookedit, etc. UVC doesn't offer that so at the end of the day, most of the time, it is either a wash or you might pay more with UVC, not to mention the loss of your membership fee, which, depending on how well they sold you on the perks, could be $10,000 to $20,000 for the basic membership. Good luck!

Hello,

I became a member in April 2012 while being on vacation in Republic Dominican. I am leaving in France and faced bad surprise when looking at UVC / RCI package offering no benefit especially from Europe departure.
I would like to get money back which seems hard to achieve or to sell package with discount.
Could you or somebody else with similar experience provide me with guidance ? Any help would be highly appreciated ... Merci !

[Hilgy Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hilgy]

Don't do it.... We joined in dec. and have nothing but problems.... Just returned from Now Sapphire it was the worst vacation of our lives. The staff was so rude and the management was even worse. We joined the club in Dec. and have had nothing but problems and people lying to us ever since. We were called nasty names by staff and complained to different managers and were told there is nothing they can do about what their employees say. We were told we would get an upgraded room when we book they put us in a room with two small beds... The worst customer service.... I called corporate the second day and still haven't heard from them. Now 8 days ago...

[BethHS Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close BethHS]

This is absolutely horrible and the biggest lie ever told. Is anyone interested in a class action suit against them as their contract does not state what they say it does. Blatant lies and they do nothing to rectify the situation. I will contact PROFECA as suggested above but at this point I think a good lawyer is in store- numbers speak volumes. Any thoughts?

[SallyHoover Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close SallyHoover]

This is absolutely horrible and the biggest lie ever told. Is anyone interested in a class action suit against them as their contract does not state what they say it does. Blatant lies and they do nothing to rectify the situation. I will contact PROFECA as suggested above but at this point I think a good lawyer is in store- numbers speak volumes. Any thoughts?

Problem is class action suits are very hard to win and very expensive. The resorts usually write the rules so that on their side they can just raise the members fees to cover their side of the legal expenses. The Class either needs to front enough money to pay for their lawyers -which often end up running in the hundreds of thousands or if you are able to find lawyers who will work on a contingency basis they are usually more interested in settling as quick as possible to cover their fees and not really interested in fighting for the clients. The fact that it is in another country with different laws and with members based in multiple countries does not make it any easier. Unfortunately I think if you pay anyone (even those who claim they are lawyers) you are just as likely to get scammed trying to get out of the first scam.

Numbers do speak and perhaps organizing as many members to register complaints though PROFECA might be your best recourse. But I don't see a class action suit having the effect you are hoping for.

[RandyVereeke Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close RandyVereeke]

I actually signed up for this the other day and after logging into their website with "discounted" rates that I was lied to to the effect of several thousand dollars worth. I feel completely ripped off and am actually waiting in their room right now to try and cancel it while I'm still here. They've been making me wait for ten minutes now...

[MisleadnTX Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close MisleadnTX]

I just signed up last week with a membership for our company. I made the sales guy and supposedly the assistant GM pull up what rates would be the first week of January. The only reason I bought the membership, is that we love Secrets Maroma. I got my packet and welcome email today, and the rate that they told me I would pay (this way just last week) was 2,000 less than I can actually booked it for. We were going to buy 4 rooms, so we're talking about an $8,000 difference. I haven't even started on the RCI properties, but they promised that I would have access to all the Hiltons in the NY area, so I'm curious to see if I'm able to pay just $499/ week, like I'm told. This is a tough situation, because we love the resort, but we're obviously lied to, in a major way. Has anyone else experienced this with a Secrets Maroma membership. Really really disappointed and upset right now. Thanks for your help

[SallyHoover Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close SallyHoover]

If you are in the rescission period (usually 3-7 days from signing) you should do so. You already found out one of the primary reasons you bought turned out to be a lie. As to the Hiltons. It isn't the hotels it is the vacation club. There are 2 that semi regular deposits. More get deposited into the points inventory of RCI then the weeks side. Not every week is deposited. You generally have to use an ongoing search for specific weeks to grab one and they are usually deposited 6-10 months in advance. It is usually not possible to obtain multiple units for the same week. As the the price, the rci exchange fee is $209 and that would be in addition to the cost of your weeks. To get enough trading power your resort would have to deposit about 4 weeks for each NY week. I don't know if they would do that for a single weeks fee paid by you or would require multiple. I would assume it would probably be in the $699-$899 range for a NY week provided you can plan and start an ongoing search at least 10 months in advance for the weeks you want.

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

My work sent me don to do a review on the unlimited vacation club, and I am so sorry at what some of you have had to go through.

My main problems with UVC are:

Financial. You don’t have to be a math whiz to figure out that paying for 30 years worth of vacations up front is not a good deal. Since vacations are not physical products like a car, or house you are really getting nothing for the money you throw down. Combine that with the crazy high interest rate, and you can see that this vacation club does not make financial sense.

High Pressure Sales Tactics. If a product or service is truly good, the company selling it rarely has to resort to high pressure sales tactics. After we said we were not interested in getting a membership and would like to leave, we were stuck there for another two hours as they rotated through another four people with rising seniority to try and get us to sign. We couldn’t just walk out the door as we needed them to get us a taxi to get from the sales center back to our resort.

Risk. $70,000 for the gold tier is a lot of money. We urge you to think about what you would do if something goes wrong. If these vacation clubs were based out of the US, you have lots of legal options you can take to get your money back. However, if you sign their contract in Mexico (and their parent company might be based out of another country such as the Dominican Republic) then there is not an easy way for you to take action to cancel your membership should you want to opt out. Sure you can get the price to come down after haggling, but it's still nowhere close to being a fair deal.

We found that a large number of unhappy customers have been posting online about their difficulties with cancelling the membership. When we asked the sales center manager about this, they said we can simply stop paying anytime – which in our opinion is a complete lie. You’re signing a binding contract, and there can be repercussions if you break that contract – even if it’s in another country.

REMOVED LINK

Copied your post but removed your link to your site. In order to have a link here you would need to provide a link from our site on your site.