I got a call late on a Sunday evening saying that ...

I got a call late on a Sunday evening saying that I had won a contest that I had signed up for at a festival a few weeks before. I was told that I won and ipad and I had to do was come out to the resort and take a 90 minute tour. No big deal. If I had known that it was a timeshare resort from the beginning though, I probably wouldn t have put my name in for the contest.

My girlfriend and I made the trip to the resort last weekend and were greeted politely at the front desk. Once we got signed in, we met our tour guide who I ll refer to as P.A. . We were immediately thrown into a cheesy sales pitch conversation. We took a small tour around the building before we hoped into P.A. s car for the tour around the resort. The whole time he preached about how vacation was a healthy part of life and how he wished he had known about the wonders of time shares during his life while he was overpaying for vacations. Sorry about your luck, P.A.
After about an hour, he started getting a bit more aggressive with his pitches to the point of making us feel uncomfortable. We were very clear from the start that a timeshare wasn t in our budget and we weren t interested. I m 25 years old, I figured that it would be pretty easy to understand, I suppose not.

On multiple occasions, P.A. made sure to tell us that he had to give up tickets to the JMU football game today because he had to work. I did feel bad for him, as it was their Homecoming, but don t try to guilt me into buying a timeshare from you just because you had to give up tailgating to go to work.
On two occasions during the tour, he would pull into completely empty parking lots that were completely off of the beaten path, park his car in the middle of it and talk to us intensly about the financials of the timeshare purchase. I haven t felt that uncomfortable in a VERY long time. A guy that I have never met takes my girlfriend and I completely away from everyone else and is trying to sell us something. Are you trying to win the purchase with intimidation and awkwardness? Maybe you should go with a different sales tactic.

Our final stop on this lovely tour was to a one bedroom/ one bathroom condo that was available. This place was not nearly as luxurious as we had been made to believe and at no point did I think that I would enjoy even one night staying there. It seemed more like a dorm room set-up the way that all of these condos were organized in this building.

Finally, AFTER 3 HOURS, we got back to the resort where P.A. was gearing up to give us the last pitch and try to get us to purchase a time share. He went over all of the financial offers and even through us a special one day offer . Once again, we politely told him that while the resort has beautiful scenery, that we were not interested. He acted completely insulted and became very rude, like we had wasted his time. The mean looks and cold shoulders started right about then. I m sorry P.A., but it is completely the other way around. We were taken into a back room to get checked out by a manager who seemed to thankfully be much more pleasant. The only thing that annoyed me about her was the fact that she tried to slyly offer us a really special deal . Sorry, still interested. Finally we were given the prizes that we had won and got out of dodge after about 3 and a half hours from first arriving to the resort.

What started off as a 90 minute commitment turned into almost 4 hours. What did I really win in this situation? And IPad and an extremely unpleasant waste of a Saturday. Avoid this place at all cost, it s a complete rip-off and you are treated like garbage if you express no interest in what they are selling. I ll never be back there and I will make sure that everyone I ever talk to about vacationing knows how poorly we were treated at Massanutten Resort.