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Re: Re: How I fought and won the TS battle (by KC):

leeannw31 wrote:

Hello. My husband signed for a “membership” at Palace Elite in Mexico on July 22nd. He sent an email on July 25th stating he was exercising his right to cancel the contract. Palace Elite didn’t reply to the email, so he sent another email cancelling the contract on July 28th and and referenced his email that he sent on July 25th. The resort failed to acknowledge receipt of the email until 6 months later. Now they are claiming that the is not contract cancelled because they gave him day passes to the resort. The day passes were “an award” and it not a part of the membership/timeshare contract. We contacted Profeco, but haven’t heard back yet.

To be clear the day passes are not a part of the membership contract, but the resort is trying to make an argument that the day passes are considered services and won’t acknowledge the cancellation of the contract.

Frankly, I would be inclined to think that a much bigger potential issue than day passes might be whether a contract rescission initiated solely by an email message was ever legally sufficient to cancel the contract in the first place.

Unless a “contract cancellation by email message” option was clearly and specifically identified as acceptable in the notice of cancellation rights provided at the time of contract execution, an email message (which, by definition, lacks any actual signature and / or identity verification), might very well have been legally inadequate to rescind the contract. If that was the case, then the "email cancellation" message (as well as the second email sent a few days later) may have just been deliberately and completely ignored if regarded as being legally deficient for contract rescission.

Rescissions generally require that a cancellation be submitted within the law's deadline (5 days, in Mexico), in writing, under signature and mailed or delivered to the location of contract execution (except that in the U.S., rescissions go to a chain's corporate headquarters address instead). It's frankly very difficult for me to imagine that an "email message" is a legally sufficient alternative to the customary specific rescission instructions, but I would be happy to be wrong. I have simply never before heard of any option to rescind a contract "by email message". Just color me very dubious.

I wish you luck, but you might have a real battle on your hands regarding whether a contract rescission was ever properly executed at all in this matter, regardless of the issue (or relevance) of "day passes" having been being provided.