Westgate Resorts Timeshare Studies Conclude Single Guys are Less Susceptible to Scams than Women

April 16, 2010

For those of you who are not that familiar with timeshares, timeshares purchased directly from a timeshare developer are a huge ripoff. I know – I used to sell them, and I’m not proud of it. Don’t let the presence in the timeshare industry of corporations that earned their good names in other industries fool you – names such as Disney and Marriott. Timeshares purchased from the developer are a ripoff if you buy through those companies, too.

As if the annual fees – most of which are only obliquely mentioned during the sales tour - are not enough to make it more economical to simply stay in an equivalent hotel, resale values for timeshares – which generally sell initially in the low five figures – are virtually 0 everywhere. And often the resale value is plain-old 0, as in $0.00 – unsellable. While there are a lot of bogus purported timeshare resale companies that will take your money to run ads to sell your timeshare, there is virtually no real market for used time shares. Basically, the $15-25K one typically pays a developer as the cost for a timeshare results in having something which is entirely worthless immediately. Without the free ticket offers, snake skin-booted sales managers, and felons conveniently placing their hands over the bad news in the fine print at the closing table, forget about selling it.

About the only thing aspect of timeshares that isn’t a ripoff is that timeshare resorts pay people handsomely just to come look at them and endure the sales pitch. While timeshare developers typically give away free tickets to theme parks and such to get people to look at the resorts, they also sometimes give away cash. In recent years, it was not unusual to find resorts paying people $100 and up just to take the purportedly “only 90-minute” tour.

I have some free time tomorrow in Orlando, and so I figured I’d spent some of that time making money sitting through a timeshare sales pitch, which in my case also has some entertainment value – sometimes a lot of entertainment value. I basically turn the sales tour into a comedy routine, even if it just entertains myself, though its hard for the salesperson not to pick up on it.

What I found out today, however, is that while historically single people of both sexes could get the free tickets and cash to tour the resorts, at least one major timeshare developer – in fact, the single-largest privately-held timeshare company in the world – Westgate Resorts – no longer offers such inducements to single guys. Westgate will still tour single women, but, in their experience, single guys so rarely are suckered into “investing” in a timeshare that it doesn’t pay for them to give us free tickets or cash to see the resorts. And, of course, single guys – as opposed to married guys – aren’t stuck bringing their spending half with them on a timeshare sales presentation.

First, to back up a bit, I want to say that there are a variety of reasons guys get married that do not in any way indicate that someone is generally prone to being scammed. Included among those are:

-wanting to please one’s parents;

-guilt over having slept with a chick for so long;

-lack of game combined with an aversion to doing hookers;

-the spectre of lifestyle altering child support obligations were one not to marry the babymama;

-having done too much MDMA while watching a Nora Ephron movie marathon; and

-having political aspirations and meeting the daughter of a wealthy and politically-connected Arizona beer distributor.

That having been said, I have long maintained that single, straight, never-married guys over about age 25 are the best possible jurors for the plaintiff or prosecution to want to have in a case involving a scam. Having not fallen for what, painting with a broad brush, is the world’s most pervasive scam – modern marriage – we have proven ourselves adept at spotting a ripoff.

Westgate Resorts: Single Guys Need Not Inquire

Westgate Resorts – with nearly 30 years of successful experience to draw from in the timeshare industry – obviously agrees. We should take Westgate’s patent gender discrimination against guys as a compliment.

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