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I wasn’t so much interest in timesharing as I was in the free lunch. My idea of vacation runs not so much to luxury hotels in exotic parts of the world as to camp sites by mountain streams. Any interest I had in timesharing beyond the free lunch offered in exchange for listening to the presentation——that’s smooth talk for sales pitch——was more for my wife than for myself. Barb’s idea of vacationing is broader than mine. Part of the problem is my job. I get paid to go places and stay in nice hotels. When vacation rolls around, I have no interest in doing then what I do all the rest of the year. The last time Barb went to Hawaii, she went with a friend and I stayed home. I admit that, when I do break down and go somewhere I haven’t been, I enjoy it. All I need is something to get me jump-started. It’s not the sort of job I would like for even five minutes. I’d noticed the young man with a clipboard and a shirt bearing the logo of a luxury hotel every time I had a layover in Puerto Rico. I didn’t know what he was selling at first. It seemed sad that the people he approached on the sidewalk along hotel row——obviously tourists from their pale or reddened skins——all seemed to brush him aside. It seemed a depressing way to try to make a living. I asked the woman who explained the advantages of timesharing to me how successful the sidewalk solicitors were. She said they did very well. Hearing that made me feel better. I knew nothing of the concept of timesharing beyond a vague understanding that what you bought was a regular block of time in the condo or sailboat or whatever. I have vague memories of having heard bad things, but I certainly didn’t hear any negatives from the young woman who explained it all to me. First came lunch, then the tour of the hotel, the pools, the restaurants, the shops, the beach. Then came the pitch. What this particular club’s plan amounted to was 30 years of one-week vacations in a timeshare luxury hotel for $15,000. Works out to about $500 a week for a hotel room that might retail for half that a night. Well, make it nearly $800 when you add in the annual maintenance fee. But there are other benefits. You can pack the place with guests at no charge, or give your week to a friend or family member as a gift. You can skip a year and take two weeks some other time, or you can bunch your 30 individual weeks and run the contract out in less than 30 years. The best part is, you don’t have to spend every vacation week on the beach in the same place for the next three decades. You can trade for a week at any of dozens of equally luxurious hotels all over the world. Well, yes, there is a small fee involved, and surcharges for high-demand places such as Paris. What surprised me the most was a lack of sales pressure. I’d asked a few questions I’d written down before I went in——yes, you can sign up for no-smoking, and yes, you can will your timeshare to your children, and yes, you can sell the balance if you decide timeshare isn’t for you——and then the young woman turned me over to the closer. Here it comes, I thought. I was surprised again. I explained to the man I was mostly interested in learning how timeshare works because I thought it might be something my wife would be interested in, if for no other reason than to get me to go places with her now and then. The only “pressure” involved was his offering me a phone to call her and get her okay on the spot. I declined. We’ll have to check around, of course, see what people who own timeshares think of the concept. By the time you add all the fees and divide by vacation days, the saving, if any, doesn’t appear to be great. But having all that money committed might be just the ticket to get me out of my back yard and into the wide, wide world at least one week each year. |