QUESTION
Can my husband and I get out of a vacation club contract if we have not given one cent to the company? Really forced to sign up. They pressured.
Asked on Nov 12th, 2013 on Consumer Law - Florida
More details to this question:
We were on our honeymoon on a a trip we got a deal on for going to a timeshare presentation. We had turned down the timeshare people after 6 hours of them trying to pressure us. All of these companies are out of Florida and we live in Texas. The next morning we were asked to attend another type of vacation discount club presentation in order to get to board the ship without waiting. We kept telling those people that we had no money at all and therefore did not want to join, because they were asking us for a down payment to start on a 2,000 membership. They were relentless and we just wanted to leave to go on our honeymoon. They finagled us into signing up with no down payment. We have not given these people any money whatsoever and they keep harassing us for our monthlypayment. We did not and do not want this. We are wondering if we are bound to this contract when we have not put any money towards it, or if we can tell them we're not interested. Again they are in FL and we're in TX.
1 ANSWER
Consumer Debt Collector Harassment & Abuse Attorney serving Tampa, FL
Partner at
Tischhauser Law Group
2 Awards
I hate to tell you this, but if you signed a contract with them, you will start from the point of you made the deal and now its yours. The problem with duress defenses in these cases is that it is very difficult to overcome the greed motive of the consumers that they feed into. Noone forced you to attend any of these presentations, you chose to go to them becuase you wanted some "free" things and thought you would get over on them by simply resisting thier pitch. While many people actually get free hotel stays, etc doing this, enduring the sales pitch and standing strong on NOT buying anything is the key. If you don't want something, the law requires that you refuse to sign, etc. If you "just wanted to leave to go on your honeymoon", there is nothing that prevented you from doing so and thats exactly what you should have done and should do in the future. Absent a literal gun to your head, the "duress defense" in this type of fact patterm really amounts to a classic caseof "buyers remorse"
In the mean time, you may want to check with your state attorney general to see if they have any issues with the company as sometimes these companies violate various state laws related to such contracts, they may intervene if they see a lot people being done wrong.
Answered on Nov 20th, 2013 at 10:09 AM
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