In the previous post, we discussed how the “90 minute timeshare tour” often turns into a nightmare five-hour marathon torture session, all devoted to pressuring you into buying an ephemeral interest in a limited amount of time per year at a resort property. At how the tour, and the “freebies” you’re promised, are all bait to get you on the line. In this post, let’s look at some of the tricks salespeople use at these presentations: the hook itself, so to speak.
For starters, the salespeople at timeshare presentations are well trained in a plethora of tactics. There is a script within which they have some leeway to play, but with a set arrangement of steps that have been distilled over the years by hard-sales experts to most quickly and efficiently weaken the wills of potential buyers.
The script they follow often begins with a sort of warm greeting, then quickly moves to a brief description of what the consumer attending the pitch will be “learning” about. But they wave this aside and move to what salespeople refer to as the “warm-up”—a brief period of small talk, during which they do their best to build rapport, create a sense of similarity between yourself and them, which makes you more prone to like them—and thus to avoid “letting them down” by not purchasing what they have on offer. After this they transition into introducing the sorts of timeshare interest they will have on offer—like floating weeks or fixed weeks or points—and then they bring up the great timeshare they have on offer just for you.
At this point you are presented with a price for the given timeshare.
This price is almost always startlingly high. And it is not the price that they will eventually offer you.
The “Door-in-the-Face Technique” is a tried and true sales technique, in which the initial proposal is unreasonably high, so as to make a lower price put forward later in the pitch (which may have been seen as unreasonable itself if presented first) seem quite reasonable by contrast.
To present this more reasonable price, the initial salesperson nearly always brings in a sales manager, who takes the first person’s place. They explain that the price their compatriot presented to you is for someone who just came off the street. They “aren’t supposed to show you this, but…” they present you—special you!—with that “more reasonable” price. Often they tell you that it’s “special inventory” of very limited number, or that it will only be available at that price for an extremely limited amount of time. (This plays with a psychological sense of “scarcity” that convinces people to buy things so they don’t “lose” them.)
Often, to sweeten the deal, these salespeople will promise amenities at the timeshare that don’t exist. And, since these amenities are not in the contract you later sign, they can claim it wasn’t actually part of the deal. This is fraud, and it is a crime—but they count on you finding it very hard to prove.
They will also use incorrect math to convince you the value of your timeshare will go up. Or that you’ll be saving scads of money that in fact you will not. And they will do everything they can do to keep you there, hour after hour, until your willpower to resist their pushes, pleas, entreaties, and demands is at last exhausted—and you sign away tens of thousands of your hard-earned dollars.
Almost nothing is off-limits in their efforts to get you to buy. And that’s predatory. It’s evil.
At The People’s Advocate, we are passionate about standing up for the victim of these deceptive, criminal practices. Attorney Joe Brien has decades of experience at confronting these doers of ill deeds. Contact us if you’ve fallen prey to these tactics and found yourself down thousands of dollars as a result—we can try to get that contract annulled. But (and this is no sales tactic): act fast! The time you have to rescind these contracts is distressingly limited.