Section 75

PrincessAthena · 11 September 2016 at 8:26PM

Hello Everyone

My first ever post on these forums so please bare with me as I don't know all of the acronyms!

My partner and I took out a timeshare with H10 last year whilst we were on holiday in the Dominican Republic. They promised us two free holidays (they signed a document to say we could have this!), and cheap holidays for the next 25 years! We realised pretty early on that it was too good to be true and that we had been scammed :-/ We made a down payment of £2000.00 on our CC and set up a regular payment of $120 (about £80 each month also on the CC) Very costly mistake! so far about £3000.00 and rising each month!
We realised it was a scam when we tried to book one of our free holidays, to be told we had to make a payment of $200! The documents we have make no mention of having to make payments for our free holiday.
I tried to cancel the time share with H10 as they have offices in Ireland thought it would be easy. They passed us over to the Dominican Republic who could no longer speak English, conveniently! I put in numerous complaints but they would not respond. Or at least their responses were just to pass us to different teams and then they would fob us off.

I contacted my CC provider Lloyds who said they would look into my claim. They have managed to freeze the monthly payments so far. Although H10 seem to try to take them under a different name e.g 'dummy dollar' and sometimes it gets through!

I put my claim in to Lloyds in June via email (which is what they told me to do after speaking to them on the phone). They responded at the end of July to ask for all documents and reasons for my claim in the post. Which I sent special delivery. I had confirmation they had received it all at the beginning of August. I called them a few weeks later to chase the progress for them to say they had all my documents but no covering letter to explain why I was making a claim! I found it hard to believe as they had all the other documents I had sent to them and the covering letter was stapled together with it all, but anyway I emailed them the covering letter.
It is now mid September and I have still no update from Lloyds. Is there a deadline for the CC company to respond?
Has anyone else dealt with this H10 company and been successful in getting money back? Do I go to the Financial Ombudsman as have had no luck with Lloyds? Or do I wait?

Sorry for the essay would just really like some help!

meer53 · 11 September 2016 at 9:27PM

There's no deadline really. The CC company will have to liaise with the Timeshare company, they probably won't be in a hurry to respond. You can go to the FOS if you're unhappy with how Lloyds are dealing with your claim but it sounds as though they are doing something, albeit very slowly.

eddddy · 12 September 2016 at 12:09PM

It sounds awful.

The only comment I would make is that s75 specifically only covers breach of contract or misrepresentation. (e.g. it won't provide cover for 'poor value for money' holidays etc.)

So you need to be very specific with Lloyds about what breaches of contract occurred - e.g. by pointing at specific clauses in the contract you signed, and that the holiday company later breached.

And/or you need to point out specific misrepresentation - e.g. in this brochure it says "...." which is untrue.

Also, what law applies to the contract? e.g. If it was Dominican Republic law, you have to show breach of Dominican Republic Contract Law (which may be different from UK contract Law).

eskbanker · 12 September 2016 at 1:19PM

PrincessAthena wrote: »

I tried to cancel the time share with H10 as they have offices in Ireland thought it would be easy. They passed us over to the Dominican Republic who could no longer speak English, conveniently! I put in numerous complaints but they would not respond. Or at least their responses were just to pass us to different teams and then they would fob us off.

Have you actually succeeded in cancelling your contract yet? If H10 are still trying to take monthly payments this would suggest that they haven't accepted your cancellation - what is the cancellation policy within the contract that you signed?

PrincessAthena · 13 September 2016 at 8:10AM

Hello

Thank you all for your comments 😊
I have explained to Lloyds in my covering letter all of the breaches of contract H10 have broken. The reason we took the contract out was because they said we could have two free holidays as part of the welcome package. The contract states they are free vacations to stay in any of their hotels for 7 nights. We were made aware we would need to source flights ourselves. When we tried to book them they wanted more money for us to book the hotel stay with them. I have emails to proove this.
Once H10 asked for this, i responded that no where in our contract does it state we have to pay anything for our free holidays & that i wished to cancel. i asked for a full refund as i felt they had breached their contract. They just continued to pass my emails to various departments within their company but no one ever gave us a response. Thats when i approached the bank.

The contract is written under Irish law which i beleive is quite similar to UK law. As far as im aware when a contract says 'free' you should not have to pay anything to obtain your free gift or it is not considered free.

All of this i have stated in my letter to lloyds.

jobbingmusician · 13 September 2016 at 8:30AM

You say that some payments from your Lloyds account 'are still slipping through'. This sounds as if it might be a breach of the DD guarantee. Have you pursued this?

eddddy · 13 September 2016 at 9:29AM

jobbingmusician wrote: »

You say that some payments from your Lloyds account 'are still slipping through'. This sounds as if it might be a breach of the DD guarantee. Have you pursued this?

It's not a Direct Debit. The payments are coming from a credit card - so it will be a Continuous Payment Authority.

But in any case. the OP has cancelled the CPA with the bank - so any further payments under that CPA should be refunded.

(But that doesn't solve the OP's bigger problem. In fact, by cancelling the CPA and stopping payments, the Timeshare co might say the OP is in breach of contract, and sue the OP.)

eskbanker · 13 September 2016 at 10:34AM

PrincessAthena wrote: »

I have explained to Lloyds in my covering letter all of the breaches of contract H10 have broken. The reason we took the contract out was because they said we could have two free holidays as part of the welcome package. The contract states they are free vacations to stay in any of their hotels for 7 nights. We were made aware we would need to source flights ourselves. When we tried to book them they wanted more money for us to book the hotel stay with them. I have emails to proove this.
Once H10 asked for this, i responded that no where in our contract does it state we have to pay anything for our free holidays & that i wished to cancel. i asked for a full refund as i felt they had breached their contract. They just continued to pass my emails to various departments within their company but no one ever gave us a response. Thats when i approached the bank.

The contract is written under Irish law which i beleive is quite similar to UK law. As far as im aware when a contract says 'free' you should not have to pay anything to obtain your free gift or it is not considered free.

Just to play devil's advocate, I can imagine their line of argument is that the $200 is some form of admin/booking fee and that the hotel stay itself is free, but obviously you have sight of all the paperwork and we don't!

In terms of "all of the breaches of contract H10 have broken", what else is there other than applying a charge to the 'free' booking? An extra $200 in the context of £3K spent is relatively small but I'm sure this is more about the principle - however, it'll help your case to understand how it'll be perceived by independent third parties, so the scale of any breach may come into play, in that contracts can usually be terminated by either party where there is a material breach (what does yours say?). If, for the sake of argument, your claim is that H10's imposition of a $200 fee is the breach of contract, how would you feel if Lloyds simply reimbursed that charge and left you in contract?

meer53 · 13 September 2016 at 9:27PM

A few posts on the internet state that a fee is charged if you're booking into an AI hotel with H10, is this the fee they're charging ? It's to cover the AI element of the holiday.

PrincessAthena · 17 September 2016 at 1:38AM

Hello

The contract states we must pay $200 to book our weeks holiday under the time share plan. However we were offered a free vacation on top of this which is seperate to the plan, anywhere we want to go with no mention of booking fee. They said we could have it as they had met their quota for sign ups that month. We also had another company called RCI, which has also charged us money for having this time share. It just seems like there are so many hidden fees that keep cropping up.

Its more to the point that there seems to be no way of cancelling the plan at all! So many emails sent with no reply. Letters sent with no response. Phone calls just fobbing me off. And now their phone lines dont even work, its disconnected! Ive been trying for the past year to cancel & getting no where.

I dont expect to get all my money back. But as i have been trying for almost a year to cancel this plan i'd at least want the premiums back that i have had to pay since trying to cancel.

eddddy · 17 September 2016 at 3:52AM

PrincessAthena wrote: »

Its more to the point that there seems to be no way of cancelling the plan at all!

Do you mean cancelling the whole timeshare contract? Does your contract say you can cancel?

Most timeshare contracts don't allow you to cancel. Your only option might be to try to sell the timeshare - if you can find a buyer.

If you google 'cancel timeshare' you will find lots of discussion about this.

A few people seem to suggest that you just stop paying and wait for the debt collectors letters and solicitors letters - and hope that the timeshare company eventually give up, rather than taking you to court for breach of contract.

Here's one site that offers advice (but I don't know how good their advice is) : http://www.timeshareconsumerassociation.org.uk/advice/how-to-cancel-timeshare/

Edit to add:

Selling the timeshare may not be easy. If you look on ebay you'll see lots of unsold ones for 1p, 25p, 99p and upwards - because the annual fees are more than the week's holiday is worth. But perhaps yours is a more valuable one.

Section 75

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