Cameron, Haley, and Travis saw an advertisement for a water park in a natural inlet on the coast near the town of Tulum, called Xel-Ha. While walking through town, we saw a tour business offering tickets to Xel-Ha so we stopped in to ask about prices. The retail price was about $300 plus the cost of the cab (another $100). This seemed a little out of our cruising budget so we started to leave. The tour guy then said that if we were willing to stop at a timeshare development called the Mayan Palace on the way over for a 90 minute presentation (which included a free, complete breakfast), they would pick up all our costs including transportation costs, except for $100. Not having been to a timeshare presentation before, this did not seem too high a price to pay to get about $300 of our costs covered to go to the water park. So we agreed to go. On the designated day, they picked us up in a van and drove us to the Mayan Resorts condominium development near Playa del Carmen. Among other things, it boasts the largest swimming pool in Latin America (which we only walked by). We met our appointed sales agent, a young Australian guy. The presentation started off gently with a mild grilling about our intentions trying to determine, I believe, our ability and desire to purchase one of their units and to see if we were regulars on the timeshare circuit looking for freebies. We were certainly looking for the freebies, but were not regulars so we passed the initial test. We then were treated to a very nice free breakfast before they showed us the development. It is a huge real estate development right on the Mayan coast with what looked like thousands of units, a nice beach, golf course, and the big pool. Sort of like a big cruise ship on land. After the tour, we were taken to the sales room. That is when the hard sell began. The first guy tried to get us to commit $130,000 on the spot to purchase 12 weeks a year by trying to rationalize its value to us over the next 20 years. When we balked, he promptly dropped to about $65,000 for few less weeks. When we declined that offer, another guy showed up and pretended to be angry at us by alleging that we had never intended to buy a timeshare (true) and hoping to guilt us into buying one. The entire sales pitch was made without any printed material. They refused to even give us a brochure. They wanted us to drop that kind of money based entirely on a 90 minute presentation and some guy writing quickly and drawing boxes with a flair pen on a piece of paper. Well, to make a long story short, by the time we made it to the fourth and last sales guy the price was down to $6500, which was offered in a beg and plead approach. 90 minutes had quickly turned into 3 hours, but we were finally able to leave with our free tickets. We made it to the water park (which was nice), but we had given up much of the day at the presentation. The morals of this timeshare story are that if you are considering a timeshare never take the first offer and the freebies are never worth the pain and suffering you are going to endure.
Cayuse 