Beware of the Mayan Resorts. www.mayanresorts.info/

A better site is:

http://www.mexicantimesharefraud.com - If you need to cancel you have 5 Business Days - Don't Delay!!!!

the .info site listed above has changed and is now pro-timeshare which I suspect was done by some legal action from Mayan Resorts, as was another good-guy site: mayanresorts.org - which had step-by-step instructions on how to cancel and get some or all of your money back.

Anyway, before you go to Mexico, there are some things you should realize. These are NOT like any timeshare presentations you have ever been to before. If you think you can spare 90 minutes out of your vacation to pick up some freebees, you are heading for trouble.

First off, they will keep you captive for hours. At the 2 hour point in the presentation, I said to the saleman, "your 90 minutes are up", his reply: "You will sit there until I'm done with my presentation." Well that did it, I was done being polite. He brought over his 'manager' and before he got started, I started pointing my finger in his face, and said I want to tell you a thing or two. This ticked him off and we were on our way out of there - we thought. As we waited for our gifts to be delivered (lie), salesman #1 started his BS again, we could not believe it. My wife jumped up and started a scene. OK, this is looks bad for the people that they are getting ready to close on at other tables around us. So we are escorted outside - Great!

Now we are going to get our rewards and be on our way home. Oh, not so quick, get this: we need to do a quick exit interview with the 'good guys'. Their stick is, the outside guys work for the developer, not those crooks inside. They tell us everything inside is exagerated, and very few people are buying into it. OK, so we rate our salesman, check off a few things, and we are done, almost.

One more thing, would we consider coming back to the Mayan Palace as their guests for $199.00 for a week, plus golf, spa treatments. We said yes we would do that. All of a sudden, the $199 turned into 4,990.00 with cruises, weeks here and there, discounts, etc. Our next 10 years of vacations are set with the Great Vacations Club. This was slick, these guys were our friends, this was our reward for not buying from the evil sales company on the inside - see they work for different companies (yeah right). They have worn you down, things are sounding pretty good. We are spending $5000.00 we never intened to spend on this trip. Now we are signing, initialing, handing over our credit card, drinking Margaritas on them. Wow we are the smart ones not to buy the timeshare weeks, our new vacation club is much better value, and much more flexible.

Everything with Great Vacations Club is done on the web, in a couple of weeks, we will get our packet, login info, passwords, etc. Then we can start booking vacations - wow this is going to be great. They even sent flowers to our condo - "Welcome to the Club" - nice touch, we are now part of the elite: "We Screwed Some More Gringos Club".

Nice people nice place.

Anyway, if you have read this far, you probably haven't heard the 'gotcha'. The word on the net is all these offers in Great Vacations Club are subject to availablility, and, low and behold, there is very limited if any availability for vacation weeks, costs are more than they told you, cruise coupons are worthless, it's all a big scam.

So you got sucked in like us, what do you do? Work fast, you have 5 business days (M-F) to cancel your membership and get a full refund. We found a site called mayanresorts.org on the internet when we returned home, determined that we wanted out of this agreement, followed the instructions on their site and got a full refund in 31 days. Unfortunately, the site has been shutdown. I have put up my timeline outlining what I did to get our refund. You can view it here:

http://www.nettik.com/gvc/gvcscam.html

Also checkout the link at the top of this article for Mexican Timeshare Fraud - their cancellation instructions work for Great Vacations Club too.

I hope this helps some potential visitors - Never NEVER go to a Mexican Timeshare Presentation - save yourself the frustration (& money).

One more thing on timeshares, if you really want a timeshare, they sell for next to nothing on the resale market and ARE the same thing the con men are selling. Check ebay, there are thousands for sale under $100.00 plus closing fees. My recommendation would be not buy anything with Mayan in the name however.


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Unfortunately you got hooked into a timeshare presentation; Mayan Palace timeshare resorts are known for particularly hard sell tactics. ALL the transfer companies, car rental companies, etc. are OUTSIDE the airport. The people between Customs and the doors to the outside are almost all timeshare reps (couple of kids trying to make a few bucks hauling luggage for folks also). If you go back to the Riviera Maya do not stop or talk to any of these people until you get outside. If you feel you must be polite just say No gracias and keep walking with your eyes down or straight ahead. Most of them wear these really official looking uniforms and will tell you all sorts of lies, like how you have to show them your transfer papers, etc. Just ignore them and keep going
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