Recently I’ve been getting phone calls from various “resorts” that say if I visit them and listen to their sales pitch I’ll get a free round trip airfare to any “designated” city. The other day I got one that said I would get free round trip airfare and a $50 gift certificate “good at the restaraunt of my choice”. I could care less about the airfare but I wouldn’t mind having the gift certificate. I’m pretty sure this is a scam though. Does anybody know how it works?
If it’s anything like the timeshare stuff, the scam is they make you listen to hours and hours of a really intense sales pitch that is very difficult to resist. They do every single trick possible to make you buy their product. My parents did one of these (to get a free microwave oven) and they said that after five hours of torture with them refusing, the saleswoman resorted to crying and saying she needed the money to pay for her “little baby’s chemotherapy”. When they still refused she started cussing at them.
There’s another ‘scam’ in the UK where you get offered “three nights’ free accommodation at X number of hotels”. The catch is if you take them up on the offer, you have to buy breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel at an extortionate rate.
The sales pitch can be very hard-sell so they hope a good percentage of those who attend can be parted from their cash. Also, the free gift will often have many strings attached or obstructive conditions of use. For example, you may be offered a free flight but when you come to book it, none of the dates you wish to fly will be available. The booking procedure is lengthy (several days waiting for confirmation) and you may have to go through several cycles before you can get anything at all,. Another tactic is to insist that you purchase another service along with the free part, e.g. accommodation at unfavorable rates.
Actually, I’ve never looked closely at those spam types. They keep threatening me, and I tell 'em so*, and now, I’ve not gotten a single offer in years for cheap air fare to Florida, Mexico, or the Caribbean. 
Seriously, unless I can see how they’re getting their cut out of an offer that sounds too good to be true, I’m not going to waste time thinking about it. A general rule of con games is that they usually work by convincing the mark that s/he is putting something over on the con artist.
*I view the prospect of being sent to either Florida or the Caribbean again with fear, loathing and terror. I’m allergic to something down there. Yuck.
One version of this is that you stay for a free weekend with meals and golf at a resort but you have to spend a couple of hours of one of the days listening to a presentation. After the presentation, you go into a room with just you or you and your SO and a salesperson. It’s total hardsell to buy into a timeshare. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try to get you to buy another weekend for only $50 but you have to listen to the spiel again.
I have friends and family members who have done this but it doesn’t seem worth it to me at all.
Haj
If it’s anything like the prize packages they were offering in the 90’s, the airfare is free, but only if you buy a rental car and hotel package from the same outfit. They jack up the prices on the rental car and hotel to cover their loss on the “free” airfare.
All these scams follow the same pattern.
The mandatory sales presentation is very long, very boring and very frustrating. It uses hard sell tactics and emotional blackmail. You could try just taking a good book and reading it during the presentation, but they could object.
However, let’s suppose that you are willing to undergo the tedious sales spiel, and are mentally prepared to endure all the high pressure tactics, just to get whatever freebie they have offered.
In a small minority of cases, the freebie won’t actually materialise i.e. it’s more or less just a blatant lie. An easy way out for them is to blame a third party or some ‘unforeseeable’ problem that is out of their hands. Examples:
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we did have the weekend break holidays all lined up, but then the hotel we did the deal with went out of business without warning, leaving us high and dry. Sorry, but it’s out of our hands.
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we arranged the cheap holidays through a third-party tourist company that has now ceased trading. Sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.
And so on.
In most cases, however, there really is a ‘reward’ or ‘prize’ on offer. The catch is that actually obtaining this ‘reward’ is made immensely long-winded, complicated and awkward, and they figure you’ll eventually decide the chase isn’t worth it. Lots of form-filling, correspondence that takes forever to be processed, weird restrictions or conditions and so on. Either that, or the ‘prize’ comes with previously unmentioned terms and conditions that mean it’s not really a bargain at all. Example: the stay at the hotel is relatively cheap or inexpensive, but it’s part of a restaurant complex and you are obliged to buy all your meals there at inflated prices. Or the travel is free/cheap but the accommodation is mandatory, poor quality and hyper expensive.
It’s normally a way for companies to fill travel routes or hotel rooms that aren’t selling very well anyway and make their money on associated services/facilities.
A guy I used to know never missed an interesting opportunity of taking these offers when they looked interesting. He would listen to their sales pitch, then take the gifts and enjoy his stays. They could sell timeshares, or various overpriced wierd stuff. He stated that some of these offers were really not worth it (travel in an uncomfortable bus, way too long presentations, poor food, etc…) but that on the overall, he was pretty happy to get for instance a week-end in Ireland for free.
On the other hand, a friend who, on his advice, tried it once just couldn’t endure the lenghty hard selling and came back home at her own expense.
On a free on-line lotto game I play, I keep winning two free Eurostar tickets to Paris. The only drawback with this is that you have to buy four night’s hotel accommodation from them to qualify, The trouble with this is that the hotel rates are about double you would ordinarily pay. So, if you total the whole thing up, you are no better then if you bought the train tickets and the booked the hotel yourself. There is no such thing as a free lunch !
According to the guy I was refering to, they’re getting their cut out because they manage to convince a significant number of people to buy a timeshare or whatever else it is they’re selling. I would add that this guy was the type of person who never pass a chance of getting something for free. For instance, he would regularily be in the public for some radio or TV broadcast in which he had absolutely no interest just for the free buffet. So, I assume you must have a peculiar mindset to enjoy this kind of offers.
I also watched once a documentary about these “half-scams”. They were selling homestuff, like furnitures. Most of their clients were retired people who would eventually give in, partly because they somehow felt they owed something to the company that was offering them the trip, or to the salemsman (who, in said documentary, behaved in a very agressive, very close to insulting, way towards people not buying anything). Besides, the “customers” spent way more time listening to the salesman than visiting the place they were herded to ( I believe it was Amsterdam or somesuch. The sales pitch was taking place in a restaurant on the way, and was several hours long).
Just to add an element that is peculiar to France but might apply in some other countries. In France, after signing a sale offer, the customer gets one week to renounce to the offer if he changes his mind. It applies in particular to timeshare. So, they would offer trips to a foreign country (generally Spain, IIRC), regardless of where the timeshare was situated, so that there would be no risk the pressured customer changing his mind once he came back home.
I assume it could apply to countries other than France if the seller wants to find a way around some local laws or regulations which would be beneficial for the customer.
Last year, I received (probably erroneously*) an invitation to sit through a timeshare presentation for 2 hrs, and I’d get a free 32" television.
I went. I sat. I listened (though vaguely). I walked into the salesman’s office, and 5 minutes later, I left with a brand new TV.
*I was 18 at the time, single, had no job, and was a full-time student. Needless to say, I don’t think they meant to invite me, but once the salesman found this out, he didn’t bother with the pitch.
I’ve always wanted to go to one of these things and just sit there, with arms folded, looking like an ass, snickering to myself at how annoyed the sales guy must be since he knows he won’t be getting a cent out of me.
As others have said, many of these operations are sleazy, and I’d be wary of traveling someplace solely to get your “prize.”
That said, it’s not always a bad deal. A few years ago, my wife and I vacationed at a condominium development in Hawaii. We submitted ourselves to a (brief) sales pitch for a timeshare program, and got a substantial gift certificate to the on-site restaurant, which was very nice. This was perhaps an unusual situation, though, because the sales pitch was right where we were staying, and so it was a low-risk proposition; if it turned out to be a scam, we could just say, “no thanks,” and head back to the beach.
I actually ended up feeling sorry for the salesman. Under the circumstances, it must surely be the case that 95% of the people he meets with have no interest whatsoever in buying anything.
There’s a golf and ski resort around here that constantly offers ‘free’ vacations provided that you listen to a timeshare spiel. (I’m not sure how long the ‘short presentation’ is.) Part of the catch is that the free accomodations aren’t actually at the resort – they’re at a small hotel nearby. It’s an older Best Western or Holiday Inn, IIRC, without resort amenities. So, one of the catches is that the free stay might not be at the resort that makes the offer. If the ‘resort’ is in a small town with few other options for accomodations, they might be hoping that you make the trip to the resort only to find that the ‘free stay’ is somewhere unacceptable, and stay at the resort out of desperation.
Timeshares are enormously profitable for unscrupulous real estate ‘pushers’ since the same property can be sold as much as 52 times. (And the resort still gets to rent out the timeshare unit when it’s not being occupied.) Thus, they can afford to offer ‘free’ stays at inexpensive hotels for a few nights for quite a few people even if only a couple of them buy a timeshare after each presentation. Sometimes you will even get further unbelievable offers if you agree to buy a timeshare or attend further presentations, and the sales tactics are always high-pressure. You can easily imagine spending far more on a ‘free’ vacation than if you had paid to stay somewhere reputable.
We did these sorts of things when we were in Germany once. You could get a cheap or free trip to (someplace interesting), and a bag of like, bread and eggs and beer so long as you were willing to listen to them try to sell you some strange thing over a 2 hour lunch. It actually worked out pretty well, since we got to do a few things we might have otherwise been unable to afford, and since only my father even spoke German, the chances of us buying anything were pretty limited.
It will be “your” choice between an assortment of crappy restaurants, not your absolute choice. The gift certificate will involve a large element of co-payment (eg if you buy a meal of $100, they’ll give you $50 off or something like that).
Several years ago my wife and I attended many of these sales promotions. Most time we would get at least 2 or up to 6 nights free logging, usually some cash and/or gifts like color TV’s, small appliances, jewelry, etc. All that was required by us was give them 1.5 to 2 hours of our time for some sort of sales pitch. Most time it was more like 10 minutes for the first thing I told them was we were there only to get all the free stuff and that we wasn’t interested in buying… also it would be a waste of his time to spend more time with us. This always worked for us… we had many free excellent vacations. Seems once you attend and they get your name and you get plenty invitations.
What is funny… I would give my co workers the names of these promotions so they would get invited… the poor suckers would come back un-proud owners of some vacation property or time share… LOL then they blame me.
I just saw a South Park episode about timeshare scams that pretty much gives viewers the straight dope on all of the tactics they use (along with a hilarious storyline that satirizes “ski movies” of the '80s)
Leaping from tree to tree!
As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!
With my best girl by my side!
The Larch!
The Pine!
The Giant Redwood tree!
The Sequoia!