Just Rewards

Is it unethical to go to a 90-minute presentation which offers a reward for attending even if you know you are absolutely not going to shell out any money?  As we headed off to the Georgetown Holiday Inn to hear someone’s spiel today, I told my husband not to let me eat any of their junk food because I am gaining weight and for God’s sake not to let me convince him to buy whatever they were trying to sell.

The come-on was two round-trip tickets to anywhere in the US where Delta flies and a 3-day, 2-night hotel stay.  Sounded too good to be true, but definitely worth 90 minutes of any sort of hype.

On our first trip to Kauai, we went to a lot of these 90-minute presentations, giving us a luau and other excursions we would probably not have paid for otherwise.  But then we actually bought a time-share at one of them, which we owned for the next 4 hours until we realized just what we had done.  So we got out of it gracefully, but still with whatever reward they had offered.

On the entry form today when it asked if we had ever owned a time-share, I thought about putting the ‘X’ somewhere between YES and NO, but finally decided to just say YES.  I refused to give them our income and begrudgingly recorded what we spent on vacations last year.

It turned out not to be a time-share offer, but rather a company that offers reduced prices on hotels, condos, rental cars, you name it.  You have to put down a sizable amount of money up front and then pay a yearly fee.  They promise savings of up to 80%.

It might be fine if we liked to stay in luxury resort hotels with all inclusive packages or go on cruises, which seems to be the dream vacations for most Americans.  But that’s just not our style and probably won’t ever be.  

So despite all of their cajoling, at the end of the 90 minutes we emphatically said no thank you and they finally proceeded to give us our reward for coming.  We’re still trying to decipher the “rewards” brochure we came home with.  There are lots of lines to read between.

I didn’t have to worry about the junk food because there was nothing but water in plastic cups.