What ever happened to...

[Rich Engelhardt]

time shares & resorts and stuff like that?

We used to get stuff in the mail all the time for us to visit some place and get a free prize of some sort - if we listen to their sales pitch of how they can separate us from our vacation funds.
My wife and I got a decent amount of free stuff, like coolers and grills just for going and saying no to a sales pitch.

Did all that shift over to retirement planning?
That's what we get in the junk mail these days.
Dinner invitations for us to go and listen to someone tell us how they can separate us from our retirement funds .

[roger wiegand]

One could hope that most of the perpetrators are now in jail, but I suspect you are correct that they've just gone to prey on new victims.

[Charles Taylor]

My mother occasionally receives a letter from some outfit offering to buy her timeshare. Who knows, it might be a good deal, except she never owned one while she was alive.

[Jerry Thompson]

They used to be rife here in FL. I cannot recall seeing or hearing anything about times shares in years.
Maybe the Internet revealed what they really were.

[Mike Wilkins]

Personally I despise those sales pitches. I don't like pushy salespersons anyway, and one that attempts to make you feel guilty at the same time really gets under my skin. I'm OK with a printed sales flyer; I can just read it and add to the junk mail pile.

[Dick Strauss]

They've gone into the robocaller business as "Carol from Home Security Promotions" and "Rachel from Member Card Services".

[Erik Loza]

Honestly, I think the internet killed them. Tripadvisor, Air BnB, etc. To my mind, all that timeshare stuff was a vestige of the days when you actually needed a travel agent to book your travel and plan your vacation. Now, you get presented with all sorts of options on your mobile device. Some pushy sales guy would try to sell you this and you go, "Oh, let me Google that", and you get more options, info, and transparency than he can offer.

Erik

[Mark Patoka]

My co-worker was on vacation a couple of years ago to a beachfront area and apparently got hooked into one of those timeshare deals walking by on the boardwalk. They were probably offering a free meal or something. Anyway, he comes back from vacation, which he rarely ever took due to time and money, and ended up buying a timeshare because they were "really giving us a discounted price" (which he had to take out a loan for). Uh, yeah. I hear what he has to pay in annual maintenance fees, in addition to the fee to change his location if he wants to, plus the "extra discounted weekend deals" they will offer up.

I think part of the selling point was this if he gives them 10 names and then they sign up, he would get a bonus which could conceivably lower his price. Funny thing is they never called me or my other co-workers whose names he gave them.

[Bill Neely]

I've never considered buying one but we have some friends who've owned a timeshare on the Oregon Coast for about 20 years and are completely satisfied with it.

Try walking down the beach in the Golden Zone of Mazatlan if you think you've been pressured by timeshare salesmen.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Time shares are still there. Unfortunately, some people are still roped into paying for them. There are now businesses that sell times shares or trade times shares.

[Shawn Pachlhofer]

My brother and I are being given a timeshare that my grandparents bought years ago.

My mom and aunt have rarely used it.

my brother and I are planning to use it for family vacations for our families to get together for a week per year.

if we don't like it - we'll give it away to someone else.

[Rich Riddle]

Believe it or not they still try to get folks into the time share game. If you look online you can find them at full price or beyond. It's amazing people still fall for that gimmick.

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

They've been running radio ads here recently for companies that help get you out of your timeshare.

I was just in Las Vegas a few months ago, and while walking through one of the casinos, we were offered free tickets to a show. Just had to sit through a one hour talk.... No thanks.

[Rich Engelhardt]

I got real good at sitting through the sales pitch.
Just before the sales push came, I'd turn to my wife and say, "Man, this is great isn't it? I wonder if that bankruptcy we filed for last week will hurt our chances of getting in on this?"
9 times out of 10, the big push never came. They just went through the motions.

At first I felt bad taking up their time, but, they sent me the invitation!

[Matt Meiser]

We did the tour of one in FL maybe 5 years ago mostly to get the free Universal tickets when we had an afternoon to kill. Really wasn't worth it. We wanted to check it out and see the pricing as a possible vacation option, going into it with great suspicion based on things we'd heard before. As expected they weren't very honest (OK, they were thieving liars), were pushy to sign RIGHT NOW, and insulted our intelligence when we refused.

There are some really good deals available on the secondary market and it MIGHT be a good option if you want a yearly vacation to destination-type location and can be flexible on dates--but also in those same situations you can get good deals on sites like VRBO.com, some of which are at the same "resorts" when they have open units.