Timeshares in India?

owen

Ok, so Berta and I went to the Global Advantage thing - hopefully it can help get a good price on my upcoming trip to India.

We dropped Abby off at Mom's around 7pm on Wednesday.  I left work at a reasonable time, and when I got home, I got to play catch with Abby.  I was sad when I had to stop the playtime to cart her to Mom's for the dropoff, and things only got worse.

We drove out to Devon to the Global Advantage site.  After for driving on 30 for quite a while after getting off 202, we finally found the business center.  We parked around back and I cased out the place.  It turns out that the name of the business is actually "Global Discovery".  Well, maybe.

We entered the lobby for our 8pm appointment.  We provided ID for them to assure them that we were who we said we were.  I was a bit reproachful when Berta produced the checkbook from her purse on their request, but they wouldn't have let us in otherwise.

After filling out a form regarding our vacation hopes, we were led into a room with a bunch of other people and presented with a PowerPoint presentation.  It was narrated by a nice lady who told us all about Global Discovery.

Here's the deal...

Basically, Global Discovery is two things:  A wholesaler middleman and a resort exchanger.

Executive Merchandising Services is a company that forwards wholesale prices to consumers by enabling shipment directly from the manufacturer.  You can see a list of the product brands that they handle here.  They expect that you can see a 10%-50% reduction in price from the prices at warehouse stores.  They offer a double-your-money-back guarantee on anything they sell.

Global Discovery is a company that arranges resort weeks for its members.  For a comparitively small cost, members can stay in an apartment-like suite on their vacation instead of a hotel.  The regular program includes two such weeks at the standard prices, but additional weeks and upgrades (two/three-bedrooms) are available at a small extra cost.

On its face, the deal doesn't sound too bad.  In fact, Berta got quite a bit excited when they mentioned discount airfare.  I told her that we can already get discount airfare through Interval International, but she wasn't impressed.  As an example, Expedia lists a trip from Philadelphia to Pune, India at $3050.  Interval lists a comparable flight for $1915.  That's $1000 difference.  Anyhow...

Her eyes lit up at the prospect of cheap airfare, and so we ended up buying their deal, which we had so thoroughly agreed not to do before we left.  Thankfully, they knocked quite a bit off their original price because (at least what they told us) we are already timeshare owners.  The idea being that we would let them use our timeshare week on those years when we didn't.  This will probably happen infrequently, because we can even rent the week via Century 21 if we don't use it, and that would pay our yearly maintenance fees.

All of this negotiation took far longer than it should have.  We should have been out of there in 90 minutes (9:30pm), but we ended up not getting home until 12:15am.  I hope it all pans out.

So I was poking around on the net, looking for more information about this company, and I was started to find that they own their own class C block of IP addresses under the company name Network Direct, Inc.  Check this out:

So have we been scammed?  I don't know.  I suppose that I should call around a bit and find out what's going on.  I can't very well see sending these guys all kinds of money to end up in a Motel 6 on the wrong side of the tracks.

And finally, yes, they seem to be queuing me up to go to India, again.  If I can offer the $1000 discount, I might actually increase my chances of going.  I wonder if that's a good idea, really.  Anyway, it would be cool to blog a bit from India.  And if I plan it right, I might get to stay over a weekend in somewhere interesting like London or Paris.  Tres cool, no?