Complaint Review: Wyndham Vacation Resorts - Orlando Florida

My husband and I are very frustrated and disappointed with Wyndham Vacation Club. It is not at all what we were lead to believe we were purchasing.

Our first frustration is the inability to view resort availability online based on our membership type. We are required to call a reservation specialist and let them look up each resort we are interested in for availability.

The second frustration is because of the above mentioned limitation we are unable to easily compare airline prices to coordinate with the resort availability. In order to do so, the reservation specialist has to sit on hold while I go to another travel site to look up flights. Back and forth, back and forth.... it is just not very 2016 - more like 2002 at best.

This leads to the third frustration in that we have to then coordinate the above two limitations with our own work schedule. I don't know about other companies but we can't just take off any dates we like. Time off requests have to be submitted and approved in advance of purchasing potentially non-refundable airline tickets.

If all of the above were not enough.... the fourth frustration is there very limited availability in any of the locations we are interested in. Sorry, but Branson Missouri or the Wisconsin Dells are not our style. We were told we would need to book our time 2-3 months in advance – our last call to a reservation specialist and we are 6 months out before we can book a full week at a resort of our choosing.

I have combed through the Discovery membership property directory we were provided which lists the Club Wyndham Plus resorts available to us and it would be an understatement to say the majority of these properties are substandard 2 star accommodations at best. Most look like apartment complexes from the 1970s with dated furnishings and surroundings. Everyone knows only the best pictures are put in brochures, so it scares me to think of what the actual property looks like if the brochure images are not appealing. Trying to view the properties on the Wyndham Vacation website is no better with postage stamp size images which cannot be enlarged. To view better images I have to search/view yet another site.

Maybe our expectations were set too high. After all, the properties we were shown in the initial presentation were beautiful 4 and 5 star beach side resorts; yet even the Club Wyndham Plus resorts in Hawaii are not all beach side, with some many miles away from the closest beach – we’re talking about an island surrounded by water right?

We spent over four hours at the presentation/sales pitch and after saying "no" "no" "no" we were finally convinced to purchase the Discovery Membership to "try it out" before we considered a larger financial commitment. Shame on us for not innately knowing the extreme limitations we were to experience in our Discovery membership. At no time did the presenter or sales representative redirect us to any limitations mentioned in any small print nor were we offered to "view" images of the actually properties that would be available to us - nice bait and switch by the way.

I’m sure we were not the first to expect honesty and integrity from a company such as Wyndham. I’ve never been known to be naive or gullible, but this is one time I was taken for a fool. The only thing we discovered in our new Discovery membership was we were scammed.