What You Can Do

Last week I received yet another postcard from yet another company with the nifty headline of, "Feeling shackled to your timeshare? We hold the key to your freedom!" Yeah, right.

Regular readers will know my thoughts on these transfer or relief companies and if you were fortunate enough to see my hidden camera report on what goes on at these meetings, you know that it makes no sense at all to pay someone thousands of dollars to get out of a full-paid timeshare.

I'll be doing a feature article during the annual ARDA convention on Donate For A Cause and periodically we'll be discussing other options if you have a timeshare you no longer use or want.

But back to the postcard. On the reverse, they clearly show an ARDA logo. ARDA, for those of you unfamilar with it is the American Resort Development Association...the governmental organization in charge of all timeshare things.

I've had numerous discussion with people at ARDA and their feelings seem to be the same as mine...they do not want to do business with these type of organizations. So, I went to ARDA's website, http://www/arda.org and clicked on the Membership tab.

I scrolled down and not very suprisingly did not see this companies name on any of the membership lists.

So what did I do that you can and should do when you discover similar "errors"? And by "errors' I mean "violations." Called and e-mailed and reported it. Done...very simple

Hopefully, this will shake up someone at ARDA to do some follow up and perhaps go after these companies legally, but at the very least I certainly hope that if you discover that some company (that you shouldn't be doing business with in the first place as they contacted you out of the blue) is using an ARDA logo without permission, you don't fall for whatever they are selling.

Remember our mission for 2011? Educate Yourself, Open Your Mind, Get Involved. This falls into all three of those.