The Travel Company - Scam or Not?

BaggieBoy_3

Hi,

Had a call a few days ago asking a few questions about holidays. Thought nothing of it but today i had another call. This time they were offering a luxury holiday to Portugal including flights for one week for £49 for each of us (family of five) that can be used anytime over the next two years.

I've heard about these sort of scams before so i really pushed them about it but they kept saying its genuine. All we have to do is go to a presentation for 2 hours next week just down the road from us. Again i pushed them to say is this holiday conditional on us buying something at the presentation and they said it was not.

I asked them why this is so cheap and they said they are doing some advertising for "The Travel Company" and offering cheap holidays in the hope that we will rebook and tell our friends out it etc.

Has anyone had a similar call? Is it a scam? I've left it that they are putting the offer in writing and i will get back to them. I'd appreciate any information you people have

Bob

Magnolia

Sounds very much like 'holiday club' where they will ask you to pay thousands of pounds for the chance of a 2 week holiday once per year - dont go! When you say you are not interested they will get very nasty with you!

dzug1

They say it's genuine just to get you there. Truth doesn't come into it.

Whether this particular outfit would actually give you the cheap holiday if you didn't buy their holiday club/holiday points/timeshare I don't know. Some put impossible conditions on the cheap holiday after you've paid and won't refund.

There will be another compulsory presentation in resort where you will be much less on your guard

Even if it's not an out and out scam it's definitely a rip off.

Steer clear

BaggieBoy_3

I suspected it would be. Thanks for the advice.

As usual, if it sounds to good to be true then it normally is to good to be true!!

PorkpieUK

I went to the Travel Company presentation at Hatton yesterday, having had the same phone call as yourself. Once we were inside the buildings it became very clear that this was just Timeshare under another name! For a start the Travel Company does not exist, the company that you are actually dealing with is Shakespear Classic Lines....they seem to have a whole raft of complaints against them both in this name and in several others, I have been surfing the net since I returned and it would appear that this particular type of Timeshare / Holiday Club has been doing the rounds for a while, in fact I can remember a very unpleasant 2 hrs with a company called Dream Works Vacation Club which followed exactly the same format in Lanzerote in 2001. Essentially, this is selling you Fractional Ownership on a yacht in Turkey, were you don't actually bother to go on the yacht or exchange it for another holiday, you just take the income from the shared pot of 200 investors (maintenance / volcanic ash / airline strikes may affect this) We were quoted £13000 to £14000, a guaranteed return of 7.4% with the added incentive of cheap holidays using Interval International which are a timeshare company in the USA (Google them too, they seem to have a mixed fan club) You have make a decision then and there... helped by the offer to give you £3000 up front and your £49 holiday. In fairness to them, they were not anyway near as rude / aggressive as I expected once I had realised what they were selling and once we'd made it quite clear that we were not going to join them, they escorted us from the building, giving us a small brochure for the £49 holiday (Sugar Reef resorts....website currently under construction....you do the math on that one) however, my husband is a big bloke and I am as stubbon as an ox so they probably thought it best to cut their losses. I'm sure that some people out there have had a good returns on these types of timeshare / holidays clubs but I could only find 5 or 6 positive reports when I started looking, the fact that I found so many negative reports on Shakespear and all their previous / other names makes me feel very happy to have walked away. It would appear that any so called Travel Marketing company in Exeter / Tiverton / Taunton who cold calls you is to be investigated straight away so that you don't waste your time travelling to presentations and invest your money wisely!

FH_Brit

It must be genuine if they say it is!!!!! Nothing like honest crooks!

I just thought - it might not be the Travel Company........ It's you friendly local burgulars who get you to book a "holiday" and then you leave for Gatwick for the 1pm flight to Costa Del Breakin, and guess what? At 1:05 they are robbing your house! You at Gatwick find out it's a scam and you return home to...................

Remember That's Life? Estha used to say "If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is"!

VerilyVerily123

FH Brit, that's what I thought to - but that they'd break in while we're at the presentation. Have decided not to bother going.

Georgiexxx

I should have known I'd find the truth on this site! Just got a call from the Travel Company, inviting me to Hatton for a presentation on the back of offering me a £49 holiday. She's letting me chat over the Hatton trip with my non existent husband first before calling me back. As soon as I put the phone down I googled scam £49 holiday and where do I end up...

cdbe

OK as someone who wishes to take advantage of these, how does it work? We have been offered a £49 B&Q voucher for attending the presentation (in our case they were calling themselves "Country Breaks").

It appears to be a rework of the Club La Costa pitch we we have "worked" before for a lovely free holiday (including complimentary breakfast and hilarious good cop/bad cop presentation).

What we will need to know is:

1. Will you definately get the £49 voucher for attenting the initial presentation - as we have a long journey to get there we want this as a minimum.

2. Do you get the holiday without signing up for some kind of trial membership on the day - obviously if you are fairly keen but could not possibly make a decision without physically seeing one of the places in the flesh.

For those who genuinely want to buy into these points based holiday clubs the points can be bought for a fraction of the original cost (around £14k) through reputable reselling agencies or even less directly from desperate sellers who can't afford the flights to take a holiday after paying their finance and the annual maintenance charge - cheapest I have seen a set of Club La Costa points go for is £1300 including the nearly £1000 transfer fee CLC charge!

dzug1

As to this particular outfit - no idea. The only time I attended one of these I did get the promised voucher (and in fact a second one I hadn't expected) - but the terms of use made them impossible to take up.

But exactly how each company handles it will vary.

The thing I'd be wary of here is it actually a £49 voucher - or say a 10% off voucher so you have to spend nearly £500 to use it. I don't know, it may well be exactly what it says - but I don't trust any of these companies.

cdbe

Thanks, the vagueness is my concern; the web is full of posts about these "deals" but most are very emotive (and often sad) from people who have taken the bait and lost large sums of money and tend to be a bit confused in their detail - it is often hard to remember things clearly when plunged into a hard sell situation.

They are calling back on Monday when we have had a think about whether to attend - I will get some more details then. I was only half interested until I moaned about the distance from our home to Hatton (not telling them we have relatives nearby who we would visit) at which point I was offered the £50 B&Q vouchers (sorry it was the "free" holiday admin fee that was £49). Just the job as we are planning to replace our kitchen with B&Q.

I was talking to my wife and we both agreed that the best thing about the Club La Costa holiday we had (in Cornwall) was watching the flowers.....

The sales team had their own (very impressive) marketing suite attached to the resort; when it was our turn for the pitch we noticed, near the entrance, a stand with a number of bouquets of flowers in - we quickly figured out that these were presented to the wife if the couple signed up.

Very immaturely we got into a routine of counting the bouquets before and after each days pitches to see how many sign-ups they had got - it was not very many in the 4 days we were there!