4 years ago, I published a Guest Post on this blog from someone who was an owner at the resort formerly known as Celebration Word Resort in Kissimmee, Florida which had been taken over by Festiva.
The owner noticed certain "discrepancies", i.e. while his annual allotment of RCI points had been over 200,000, he suddenly found himself with only 30,0000. More owners found the blog and wrote in. Still more owners. All with similar issues.
A Class Action lawsuit was eventually filed. And dragged on. And dragged on. In the midst of this, nasty personal attacks were made against myself, claiming that I was feeding information to Festiva, which I wasn't. More nasty allegations were made against the law firm handling the Class Action suit, riling up consumers to the point where some of them didn't believe the firm actually existed. It does.
I understand consumer frustration. I do not however, understand consumers lashing out at the very people that are there to help, namely me and the law firm. And let me be direct here...I am not employed by the law firm. I have never been employed by the law firm. And I have never asked for, nor received a penny for my work on this matter...four years worth of e-mails, blogs and investigation.
Anyway, a settlement has been reached and affected owners have been contacted as to what their options are.
I am not an attorney. I can not and will not give advice to anyone regarding the "best" option for them to take. I can not attend the upcoming annual meeting of the resort in anyone's stead, as it would cause a lot of unnecessary distraction.
Although this situation is incredibly sad and an example of some horrendously bad practices in timeshare, I remain optimistic that this is the exception rather than the rule.
There are important lessons to be learned by everyone involved and affected. And although no jail time or fines resulted, I remain confident that cosmic karma will pay a visit to those people who acted out of greed and disrespect.
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