Steve and Tina says:-
During our stay at Mediterranean Club Cala Pi, Menorca, we signed a Global Group Hotels (GGH) Contract and an Understanding and Acknowledgement Document on 4 September 2014 to become Eurotel members. We also paid a total deposit of 8,000 euros in two separate MasterCard transactions on the same day.
Having taken independent advice on our return to the UK, we decided to withdraw from the holiday club. On 22 September 2014, we emailed Mr Tony Brown (GGH customer services), who initialled the Contract and Understanding and Acknowledgement Document at the time we signed them, to notify him of our decision to withdraw and sought repayment of our deposit, but to no avail to date. We sent the email to him because we were not advised of the address that we should write to if we chose to withdraw.
We have been seeking confirmation from Mr Brown and/or Mr Pietro Campo (a Eurotel sales manager) that they understood and had destroyed all the associated documentation for our Eurotel membership and would arrange a refund of our deposit. Some of the email exchanges also document a couple of brief unrecorded telephone conversations that we had with both individuals. We have not received any such confirmation to date. Moreover, we were not advised of the procedure for withdrawing from the holiday club at any time hence the need to send the emails to Mr Brown and Mr Campo.
Our decision to withdraw from the Holiday Club was reinforced when we could not satisfactorily complete an application for a loan of 95.702,83 euros for the balance of the purchase price through GGH’s recommended independent mortgage broker Mr Neil Page (J W Homes Estate and Letting Agents LLP). This was due to our lack of confidence about the procedure for securing the loan and his initial reluctance to provide us with basic information for the loan on the basis that most of his clients are happy for him to keep things simple.
We believe that we were mis-sold the holiday club contract because the GGH representatives failed to:
(a) clarify the ‘14 days’ cooling-off timeframe’, which could be open to interpretation (i.e. calendar or working days) despite the statement in the Understanding and Acknowledgment Document of “After 14 days, it will be impossible to cancel this legal document or to recover any of the sums paid”;
(b) provide a specific form which we could use to cancel the contract if we decided to change our minds;
(c) clearly state to whom and how we should communicate any decision we made to withdraw from the contract; and
(d) specify a guarantee of our annual rental income from being a member of the holiday club and how it would be paid to us annually, which we expected to be formally documented.
Moreover, the GGH representatives required a deposit of 8,000 euros from us on the same day that we signed the contract, which we paid in two MasterCard transactions on 4 September 2014. We are currently discussing the possibility of recovering all or some of that money with Mastercard.
We should be grateful for any legal advice that you can provide us in securing early repayment of our deposit. If you can provide any other legal advice on this matter that would be extremely helpful too. In particular, Mr Brown advised us over the telephone on 30 September that GGH intended to pass our papers to their “legal team of lawyers” to decide whether they may seek full payment of the contracted some of monies. We emphasised our complete surprise and extreme disappointment at such a course of action, but left matters there. In an email to him of 30 September we asked him to confirm exactly when GGH would be transferring those papers and contact details of the lawyers. That information still has not been provided.
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For more information regarding this article or assistance in any other timeshare related issues please contact the TCA on 01908 881058 or email: info@TimeshareConsumerAssociation.org.uk