£79 for a week at a 5* hotel with a catch...

True Romance

Thanks for the very informative reply.

To be honest I was just planning on sitting there and letting them do their spiel for as long as they see fit and engage as little as possible then just say no thank you and leave at the end.

I've not had to sign anything to say I'm even considering buying a villa / time share etc simply that I meet a set criteria and that I'll attend a 2 - 3 hour seminar at the hotel.

I meet the criteria and happy to sit and listen, even if it drags on all day, I'll still be getting 6 days at a 5 star hotel in Malta (with flights) for the same price as 2 nights in a hotel in London!

Thanks again
Mark

Arcam_boy

So how was it Mark?

True Romance

Hello mate, hope you're well?

Well the actual holiday was very nice! We hired a car directly from the airport which was a god send in the end as the hotel, although in a lovely spot, is quite remote and it saved us relying on the local buses! Again the hotel was very nice indeed, not quite sure I'd pay the £200  a night booking.com quote to stay at the hotel but what we paid it was superb!

As for the actual time share...its quite hard to write down but the post by @mindfields is pretty much spot on.

The wife and I actually said that if it genuinely worked out in our favour we'd consider signing up to the time share so went very open minded.

Went and sat with our 'salesman' a cockney chap who said he'd never been beaten on price in his 17 year career.

Spent the first two hours going through figures etc, its quite complicated if you don't know how it all works, like we didn't but basically...

You pay £19k to buy a room at the hotel for 1 week - this is the most basic room and you can go up to a £100k penthouse but the 19k gets you in the Azure group and all the 'benefits'

You then have to pay a yearly maintenance fee for that room. For the £19k one it was around £500 per year.

You then subscribe to RCI which is a large timeshare group who deal with exchanging your room/points with other members so you can stay at other destinations/hotels. This worked out at £169 per exchange.

Once in the scheme you can opt to let someone else use your room which then gives you points to redeem against another room/hotel to stay at if you don't fancy Malta. The hotels available was superb and you could stay at Hiltons/Radissons/Hard Rock hotels etc etc.

He then shows you some holidays in places like Barbados / The Maldives / Mexico and it works out at £269 for a room per week (nothing else is included) Initially this looks extremely tempting - £269 to stay in the Hard Rock Hotel Cancun can it really be true??

But hang on a minute...thats for one week and room only...at this point the salesman was doing everything he could to avoid us looking at the cost of going all inclusive.

So double the cost

£269 x 2
Then add the compulsaroy AI option set by the hotel $1500 per room per week
Then add flights and transfers

It came to around £5000 never mind paying the £19k for the timeshare or the £500 maintenance fee.

So I got the wife to get the exact same hotel up on Thomsons for the same 2 weeks - £3600 all inclusive

The salesman then had that look of dread on his face and knew we'd 'clicked on'

We looked at several other hotels to see if the scheme would actually work...nothing even got close to what some of the other companies could offer. We looked at Thailand room only, as that's where we're going next, and they couldn't even beat that for 2 weeks.

After this the salesman took us on to a quiet balcony and said they/azure just can't compete with likes of some of these bigger companies now a days and that was pretty much the end of our sales pitch.

I genuinely think they prey on people thinking they can go to the Bahamas for £269 for the week when they show you the exact same hotel in the Kuoni brochure for several thousand pound. We did see several people sign up whilst we were in the room though!

Kev R

Yep pretty much how we worked it out on a Orlando time share. By the time you've added the flights, room supplements and maintenance fees it's cheaper to book a package holiday.  

How did you get around the hire car depositt issues?

Arcam_boy

This is a true story, the outcome was purely accidental so I lay no claim to being a clever smart arse or anything like that.

By chance we received a purely speculative offer in the post from Marriott resorts, I am going back to 2000 as it was the millennium year at Disneyland Paris. Without my knowledge my wife responded and presented me with a trip to Disneyland staying at the Disney Newport Bay hotel which is on resort with direct access to the park our children were aged 6 and 4 years old at the time. We had 5 days bed and breakfast with full park access for £69 EasyJet flights to Paris brought the total to just under £250. It was made clear from the outset we would be required to spend one afternoon at the nearby Marriott resort, a model French village of cottages and apartments developed as a timeshare location.

Everything was exactly as described, the hotel, park access, transport etc. All was very well managed and organised with a first class service. We attended our compulsory afternoon hard sell although the sell wasn't that hard but must have worked as we signed on the dotted line. So here is the bit I'm not particularly proud of, we signed up for one of there most valuable packages and agreed to finance it through their own finance package, once the deal was done they took us to a lovely restaurant on the resort where we ate and drank champagne for hours until they returned us to the hotel...the children had been looked after and entertained by the onsite children's club and returned with all sorts of Disney goodies and gifts.

We returned home and after a few days started to have doubts about the commitment, within the document pack they gave me was a cancellation document, we had 14 days cooling off period which I decided to exercise. During this period we took receipt of a delivery from Marriott resorts containing a case of Champagne a Mont Blanc pen and three individually boxed orchids which I assume would have been quite valuable given the value and quality of the accompanying items. I did try to contact Marriott, although not very hard, to see about returning the items! In the mean time it was a simple task of completing a form signing and faxing to their solicitors office, they confirmed acceptance and that was that. In summary, a 5 day family holiday at a Disney resort, a ridiculously expensive meal, case of champagne some orchids and a Mont Blanc pen all in £248.

Astaroth

I did some googling the night before we went and quite a few people were commenting on how horrendous the driving was in Malta in terms of people pulling out very last minute and not having a clue how to negotiate a round about.

I hired a Peugeot 107 through Hertz for 7 days which cost £99 which included an excess for collecting/dropping off at the airport - so pretty cheap.

They offered a collision excess waiver which reduced the deposit from £750 to £0 for an extra £80 so I decided having read the reports on the driving standards and to save messing about upping my CC limit I'd just pay the £80 instead and not have to worry should I have a prang. I actually didn't think the driving was too bad, however I guess living and working in Sandwell gives you a different prospective of what poor driving is we also got 'upgraded' by 2 classes and ended up with a Hyundai i10. Not a bad little car and extremely fuel efficient - I actually thought the fuel gauge was faulty after two days of driving and it still showing as full!!

The car pretty much paid for itself in a sense as we was self catering. They've got several Lidl in Malta so after picking the car up we went and did a big shop and stocked up the fridge and cupboards. Considering the hotel charged 20 euro each for breakfast and 18 euros each for a burger and chips around the pool with drinks around 7 euro we soon saved a fair bit and just ate out at night with the benefit of being able to venture to St Julians /Valletta rather than stop around the hotel, so very glad we hired the car!!

@Kev R sounds like you got a nice little treat out of them mate! I certainly wouldn't feel too bad when you consider how much money these companies are making. Take our example...

Most basic room at the hotel with a crap view £19k x 52 makes the room worth £988k

Maintenance £500 x 52 = £26k just to look after a small 1 bedroom room per year!!