Original Message:
Re: Diamond Resorts enormously increases the cost of Maintenance/Reserves on their resorts. (by Marie J.):
We just returned from a Redweek exchange of 7-days at the nice Greensprings Resort, and a Redweek 2-day rental at the not-so-nice Powhatan "resort". While there we toured Powhatan, and could not believe their whacky scheme being touted as vacation ownership. It was the most desperate confabulation of half-truths, and whole lies that we had ever encountered at a timeshare presentation (and there have been many!).
Their "genius" approach was to place the 24 resorts that they acquired from Sunterra bankruptcy into an irrevocable trust that could neither be resolved, so what they are selling are shares in this trust (similar to a share of stock in a publicly traded company) rather than a unit's week in their resort. The obvious problem with this is that there is normally a limited number of unit weeks that can be purchased from a developer's inventory, but with their ingenious scheme there is no limit to the number of shares in the whacky trust that they can sell.
The salesman valiant attempt to address the question of, "How do you keep this from turning into a health club where more memberships are sold than what the establishment can accommodate?" was to say that Diamond International is always purchasing distressed timeshare resorts and adding them into the trust (you remember, that trust that allegedly was irrevocable, and irresolvable). Yeah, right; this presentation is over - so show me the money.