Another Scam in the - Travel Agencies & Timeshare -
Travel Agencies Scam
Nothing new here, is there? Folks you just have to use common sense. You are buying air and nothing else in a Travel Club.
The promise of a lifetime of hotel deals sounded appealing to Sharon Tassini. Plus, she and her husband would get a discount to join the travel club if they handed over the deed to the timeshare in North Carolina that they no longer wanted.
So, in June 2009 they agreed to fork over $5,000 to join Outrigger Vacation Club at the Only Way 2 Go Travel office in Plymouth.
Nearly two years later, Tassini has yet to receive any of the hotel deals she was promised. She found she could get equal or better deals booking hotels on her own than going through Outrigger. And she just paid the $700 annual maintenance fee on the timeshare after they were told there was no record of the property transfer.
Tassini was among the first New Englanders to hand over money to Only Way 2 Go or its affiliate in Methuen, Fantasia Travel Group. But she certainly wasn’t the last.
As of this week, Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office has received 303 complaints from consumers who say they were ripped off by one of these companies. Having paid membership fees that averaged at least $4,500, according to a spokeswoman for Coakley, they have collectively lost nearly $1.4 million.
Since July, Coakley’s attorneys have been pursuing a case in Suffolk Superior Court against these travel companies and the people who ran them. But the attorney general’s lawyers have yet to be able to return a dime to the people Coakley says were victimized.
Only Way 2 Go and Fantasia used various methods to get consumers’ attention. But the general approach, according to the AG’s complaint, was the same: Get prospective clients in a room, and then hit them with a hard sell.
To get people in the door for these sales sessions, calls or letters went out, offering travel-related prizes for attendees.
Once there, the participants would be told about Outrigger’s lifetime membership fees, nearly $9,000 in some cases. Oftentimes, a couple in the audience – Coakley’s complaint says they were shills working on behalf of the scammers – would be apparently rewarded with a discount because they were the first to join.
But the discounts weren’t reserved just for the early birds: As the evening wore on, the salespeople would keep reducing their prices to entice the people in the room to sign up. The couples in the room were badgered into joining, and those without sufficient cash were offered a Bank of America credit card to finance the membership. As people were signing up, they were intentionally distracted to keep them from reading the fine print, Coakley’s complaint says.
In that fine print is a clause that says any savings through Outrigger on airfare, hotels or car rentals will be “minimal if any.” Of course, that directly contradicts what the couples were told in the sales sessions. Contracts also contain a “no rescission clause” that essentially says these memberships cannot be canceled once they were signed.
People obviously didn’t see that clause. After returning home from sales sessions, many customers promptly contacted their credit card companies or one of these travel companies to cancel their memberships, only to find they were out of luck.
Even though a judge issued a temporary restraining order last summer to block Outrigger from marketing its travel services in Massachusetts, customers here are still getting bills for $249 to cover the annual club dues.
To find out what members receive for these payments, I called the membership service number on one of the bills. A friendly voice answered the phone – friendly, that is, until I identified myself. The tone then turned cold. “We wouldn’t be interested in speaking with you” was all the woman would say before she hung up.
Still, I persisted. I tried several other numbers that I could find through Internet searches and notes sent to me by distraught Outrigger members (including one number for a resort company in Hawaii that also uses the Outrigger name). The websites for Outrigger and Island Trader Vacations, identified by Tassini as a possible successor to Outrigger, were unsurprisingly unhelpful. I eventually found a number linked to Outrigger’s mailing address in Tulsa. There, another woman suggested I simply send my questions, via email, to “manager@yourtravelservices.org.”
“Manager” responded on Thursday, explaining in an email that Outrigger is essentially not responsible for the sales pitches made by independent distributors such as Fantasia and Only Way 2 Go. Members who want to cancel their memberships and get refunds need to go through the original distributors, according to “manager,” because those initial fees aren’t paid to Outrigger. The annual dues, apparently, are optional. If a member doesn’t want to pay up, they can simply opt out of getting Outrigger’s benefits for that year.
Of course, when I asked “manager” by email to spell out those benefits – or to provide an identity that I could publish aside from “manager” – there was no response.
I left a message on Thursday for Charles “Bob” Caliri, the Vermont resident who was identified by Coakley’s office as the ringleader of the Fantasia and Only Way 2 Go offices. No response. On Friday, I also called Michael Maroney, the lawyer at Holland & Knight in Boston who represents Caliri and most of the other defendants in Coakley’s case. No response.
I called the phone numbers for Only Way 2 Go in Plymouth and Fantasia Travel in Methuen. I can’t say I was shocked when I heard they were no longer in service.
Coakley’s complaint says Only Way 2 Go has been in business since early 2009, and Fantasia since late 2009. Those facts could help Coakley’s case, as state and federal laws allow for a right to cancel goods or services costing more than $25 if purchased in a temporary or short-term location.
It’s hard to believe there was ever supposed to be any sort of permanency to these offices. But if Caliri and his partners actually intended to be in the travel sales business for the long term in Massachusetts, those ambitions are most likely over.
Fantasia and Only Way 2 Go may be gone. Unfortunately for hundreds of consumers who plunked down more than $1 million for nothing of apparent value, most of their money is probably gone too.
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