Timeshare Cancellation

traceycrofts

Hello, I'm hoping someone would be able to give me some advice. I recently found out that my grandmother has had a timeshare for around 20 years that she has been paying for yearly but not using. She is in her eighties and none of us knew about this, she just brought it up in conversation a couple of days ago. Needless to say we were all shocked. She signed up around 20 years ago, went on one weeks holiday to the timeshare and since then she said the weeks she wanted were never available even though she was not wanting to go in school holidays or busy times as she has been retired all of this time. She called them and they wouldn't allow her to cancel and because it all became very stressful she just hasn't been using it but continuing to pay. She didn't mention this to us as we could have helped. My mum has now had a look at the paperwork and apparently the contract is for life with no way out - the only thing you can do is give it to a family member. Is there anything we can do to get out of this? It seems like such a waste of money.

Any help/advice is appreciated!

Thanks

Archergirl

Contact the timeshare, some of them do buyback, or you could use it, we had some wonderful holidays in ours, went to some fantastic places we wouldn't have been able to go to with out the timeshare exchange.

TELLIT01

Do you know which company the timeshare is with, and where? Nobody in the family can be forced to take it on when she dies.

We also had some great holidays through our timeshare, but availability of exchange steadily became less and less, at the same time maintenance fees went through the roof. It got to the stage where it was possible to rent a week at our timeshare for less than our annual maintenance fee.
Be prepared for some companies to play hardball. MacDonald resorts is one company which will actively pursue non-payment of fees and will not generally let people out of their agreement. The only way we got out was to pay the equivalent of 4 years maintenance fees and hand the unit back to them.