Jumping Through Hoops

In November, my friend Tara and I attended the Seattle Ski & Snowboard Expo down at Qwest Field. On our way in and throughout the expo we signed up for lots of free stuff and entered lots of drawings. By the next day, we had forgotten all about it.

About six weeks later I received a call… Apparently, I had won a free, all expense paid trip to Las Vegas for two – SCORE! I immediately called Stewart with the good news.

Catch #1: In order to receive our “free gift” we were required to attend a timeshare presentation on the Eastside within the next 24 hours. Ah ha. I could feel a scam coming on, but we decided to check it out anyway.

The next evening we attended the timeshare presentation, which took about two hours but was relatively painless. Frankly, I probably could have gotten out of it in the first five minutes by showing them that the combined totals of my checking and savings accounts had less than $14 in them. In any case, we got passed around to various people who continued to hard sell us on the timeshare idea. We adamantly insisted to each person that we “just wanted our free trip,” until they finally handed it over and shooed us out the door.

Catch #2: Upon looking at the paperwork, we found out what the restrictions of our trip would be. We could only fly out on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Bummer. We would have to pay upfront $95 to cover all the taxes and fees. We would have to stay at an “economy-class” hotel a.k.a. “off the strip.” Ah well. I suppose that’s what you get for free.

When sending in our paperwork we had to choose three departure days that might work for us. We chose three days in April and hoped for a Wednesday departure date. When the confirmation arrived a few weeks later, we discovered we would be leaving Tuesday, April 8. Ah well, it could be worse.

Catch #3: At this point I was starting to realize the company was going to make it as difficult as possible for us to cash in on our “free trip.” Along with our confirmation letter were some other restrictions and hoops to jump through. It did not come with any return envelopes (postage paid or otherwise), carbon copy documents, or receipts. I had to make photo copies of all the documents after filling them out and had to search high and low for the address to mail the $95 fee to. In addition, the $95 could only be paid by cashier’s check or money order – no personal checks. I also had a very hard time figuring out who to make the money order out to.

At this point I realized that they really wanted us to make a mistake that would allow them to decline our trip. So I was careful to read all the fine print and not make a mistake. It seemed that I was doing ok so far, until… enter biggest scam of all.

Catch #4: Last week I received a phone call from the company confirming our trip. This is where it really gets good. Apparently, our “free trip” consisted of the following: Flying out very late Tuesday night, spending Wednesday in Vegas and then potentially flying out as early as 6 a.m. on Thursday morning. So of course, I was then offered the “Upgrade Option for only $278!” For this extra money, we would receive preferred flights leaving early Tuesday morning and returning late Thursday night, for a full three days and two nights in Vegas. We would be upgraded to the strip (low end strip = Stratosphere / Sahara / Riviera / Circus, Circus). We would receive complimentary shuttles to and from the airport. We would be given $100 to gamble with and comedy show tickets.

Well that all sounds great. But how did our trip end up going from FREE to $373? For that much money I could have planned my own damn trip to Vegas and stayed in the hotel that I wanted and booked the flights that I wanted. But at this point we were in pretty deep. Once we did the math and realized it was only $186.50 per person we decided to suck it up and do it. As compensation to ourselves, we bought some pricey Cirque du Soleil tickets.

In all honesty, if I knew my free trip was going to be so much work I would never have gone through with it. And to top it all off, Tara ended up winning a “free trip” as well, which makes it pretty clear that they were given out to everyone in an attempt to sell timeshares.

But at this point Stewart and I are going to have a good attitude about the whole thing, and bottom line – WE ARE GOING TO VEGAS, BABY!