One totally free, no-strings-attached night in Sedona
Issue 12: It's definitely not too good to be true
Yesterday, Pavan and I went to our first time-share presentation. Only it wasn’t a timeshare, it was a Vacation Club — the preferred term now that timeshares have a bad rap. We’d been lured in by the offer of a free night’s stay in Sedona, then stuck around because the idea of attending a hardball sales presentation seemed intense and maybe even dangerous. Beforehand, we Googled how to avoid timeshare sales techniques, but the only advice we could find was to avoid any presentations in the first place. Another article explained in detail how the author had convinced her husband to attend two sales pitches with her, only for “Hubs” to talk her down from purchasing on each occasion.
“I’m happy to say my marriage is stronger than ever,” she wrote. “We found ways to stay strong together in timeshare presentations and resist the wedges the salespeople are trained to drive between couples during their pitch.”
Perhaps our relationship would never be the same.
“We should act like we’re ready to buy from the get-go, but that everything they say turns us off,” I suggested.
“We should ask whether they have any properties in Geelong,” said Pavan. “Tell them it’s a dealbreaker if they don’t.”
The next morning, we woke in our free cassita in Sedona. We considered skipping the presentation, but the prospect of being hard-balled was too exciting to give up. We arrived at the Tours Sales Office at 9am, took a seat under a speaker that was playing a mashup of Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Flo Rida and Adam Levine and PitBull. It was excruciating. It felt intentional: the first of any number of unknown torture techniques to come.
Four other couples sat in the foyer. One-by-one, different sales representatives came to take them away. When it was only Pavan and I and the PitBull–Ke$ha mashup left, a man in his early-to-late hundreds called our names.
“Okay,” he said. “So what is the goal of your marriage?”
“Staying married,” I answered.
“Good. Not enough people think about the end goal.”
He led us to the presentation room, where we reunited with the other couples. A woman with a burgundy bob introduced herself and started the presentation. At first, she talked about their property in wonderful Las Vegas. I wrote the name of the hotel down on the notepad they provided. She explained how the hotel had sold its carpark to the Cosmopolitan for half a billion dollars.
“That’s billion with a B,” she said.
“But half a billion is 500 million,” Pavan whispered. “With an M.”
“If you could sell your driveway without selling your house, wouldn’t you?” she asked, rhetorically. I felt muddy. I wrote on my notepad: Why is this presentation about a carpark?
She flicked through more slides of hotel rooms and company logos. I tried to understand what Wells Fargo had in common with the Make a Wish Foundation. She’d already moved on. She played a video of Australians answering the question “Who would you most like to have over for dinner?”.
“Bob Hawke,” answered one. Is this presentation just for us? I wondered. I started to look at the couples around us as though they were paid actors in a sales pitch just for me.
Once the Australians had stopped talking about their dream dinner dates (a roundabout appeal to life being about experiences and family) the presenter moved onto the rational part of the presentation. She pulled up a whiteboard and started adding up the cost of hotel rooms over the average American lifespan. The math made sense.
“But it doesn’t actually cost that much, does it?” she asked.
“No,” answered the man of one of the couples. “The prices inflixuate.”
“Exactly,” she said, then updated the math to take inflation into account. $15,000 turned into half a million. The math no longer made sense. The numbers were so big, so vast, that the math no longer needed to make sense.
“Wow,” the room gasped collectively, as she wrote down the biggest number yet.
I felt myself growing appalled at the cost of vacationing. How was anyone supposed to enjoy their annual week of resort stays at these prices? She played another video and I immediately forgot every detail of it.
“We’re not looking for a good deal, are we?” she said. “We’re looking for a—”
“—great deal,” I finished in unison.
By the time she revealed the cost of membership to her Vacation Club, numbers had no meaning. It was only ten thousand dollars and a forty-five year commitment. One couple said it sounded too good to be true. The presenter assured us that it was not.
“Remember, these incentives are only for today. There’s absolutely no pressure.”
“It’s pretty convincing,” Pavan said. Somehow, it sounded reasonable.
“Don’t ever be afraid,” the woman said. “These resorts are beautiful.”
When the presentation ended, we were not free to leave. Instead, we were reunited with our individual sales representative. I felt the anxiety of negotiation. Where I should have said no, I said not at this stage in our lives. Somehow, I stayed firm.
Once it became clear that we could not be persuaded nor financed, we were kicked out without so much as a goodbye. Through the Tours Sales Office window, we could see the other couples seated around tables, still talking to their individual sales representatives.
“I wish we’d asked more questions,” Pavan said.
“We can go back,” I said. “I can pretend we changed our mind?”
“No, no,” said Pavan. “You made the right call. Maybe next time.”
As we drove away, we put on a podcast about time-shares, slowly remembered that ten thousand dollars is a lot of money for—what? We couldn’t tell you. Pavan googled the name of the Vacation Club we’d just turned down and found several hundred reviews that used the word “scam”. A shame, we both thought. Regardless, we made it through.
I’m happy to say my marriage is stronger than ever.