Original Message:
Re: Diamond Resorts raises maintenance fees again! (by Paul L.):
We were invited to a presentation with DRI - the salesperson was extremely good – it sounded as the various fees associated with this timeshare was much less and we thought at the time we would enjoy the savings. They also offered to take one of our Canadian deeded time share as trade in, so we made the purchase on May 2012 in Las Vegas. We sent them a copy of our registered deed and about two weeks later we received a letter (dated May 31, 2012) from DRI that our Canadian Time Share is on their forbidden list of resorts and the trade-in transaction is cancelled but our contract with DRI remains in full. Upon receipt of the letter, we made several attempts to speak to someone and left voice mail messages (note: their voice mail greetings offer first name only or no name) at DRI. We finally received a voicemail message on June 7th which stated that they are not able to do the trade-in since our Canadian Resort is a third party and that our Canadian Resort is refusing to work with them. Further, they will ignore the trade-in and take it as a loss. We found out from our Canadian Resort that they were never contacted and that trade-ins, because the timeshare is registered and of Canadian laws, are a long legal process. We further understand that DRI inflated the cost of their timeshare to be equivalent to what they offered for our time share (yes we are stupid). Since the agreement between us and DRI has changed, we wrote to Stephen J. Cloobeck, advising him that we are withdrawing from this transaction as we cannot afford both. Well, they are refusing to release us and we have decided to walk away. It there anyone in this forum with similar experiences??