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Re: Royal HOliday is a scam

My girlfriend and I stayed at the Sheraton in the Bahamas last week (2nd week of June 2013) and got approached by a woman on the beach named Kendra, to attend a free breakfast in the nearby Wyndham hotel while listening to a presentation on how to "vacation better". In addition a voucher for about $125 was to be given to us at the end of the presentation. That was a red flag to me right there but we went anyway. Our sales rep was Marjorie, a Jamaican woman who has relatives in Toronto and had lost her husband to brain aneurism. Fully 50% of her communications with us were adulations, compliments and overwrought niceties. She used leading questions such as "inflation will cause prices to go up, right! Not with Royal Vacations where we freeze prices for life, you pay with points instead " to which I objected, stating that powerful deflationary forces are at work against the central banks, her 8% inflation rate example is closer to 0%, even negative. You cannot extrapolate from the last few decades of inflation (ever since Nixon got rid of the gold standard) that the same will hold in future. After a tour of some rooms in the Wyndham we were brought to her manager. He tried to convince us to make a decision right there and then. There was no time allowed to dwell on their sales pitch overnight. This was another big red flag since in all my years of investing I have learned that there is no such thing as an opportunity that can't wait. I requested a more detailed explanation from the manager, some examples to work out with pen and paper. The examples that he gave me caused cognitive strain, I couldn't grasp what he was talking about and kept bringing him back to basics. We requested to be left alone and used my GF's phone to do one search on the internet - "royal vacations scam" is the one and only search I did on google because there was no internet and we enabled data roaming for 2-3 minutes just to make sure we know who we are dealing with. That search led us to all the warnings here we needed. The opacity of their product offering is one more reason we backed out. At the end we stated firmly that we won't decide straight away, we'd need 1 day to get back to them to which the manager offered some opaque option of committing to a membership, he'd then freeze our membership and thaw it the next day if we'd go along. He adduced some strange calculations of point transfers which confused me even more. I said NO to that and we left, collecting our voucher on the way out. Despite avoiding this trap I should warn you these guys are good, if you are a couple you may end up arguing and making an emotional decision.