It has been brought to our attention that there are many complaints regarding timeshare that have been dealt with by the Financial Ombudsman UK. The legalities of timeshare are becoming stricter, and with this, there are more and more complaints with regards to contracts already made. One particular story has been highlighted in respect of a timeshare owner that felt that they had been pressured into purchasing a second unit of timeshare. They felt pressured to do so, as the sales person made the client (say Mr & Mrs X) believe that they would lose the timeshare unit they had already if they didn’t invest in a second week.
Initially this was paid for by Mrs X’s credit card, however her card expired in October 2009 and they swapped the payments over to Mr X’s credit card at this point. Mr & Mrs X were finding it really hard to gather the funds together to keep up these repayments, so in December 2009 Mr X requested that Lloyds bank stopped the payments from his credit card to the credit company that was funding this new timeshare unit. Lloyds told Mr X that this had to be cancelled through the Timeshare resort that he was repaying Mr X eventually managed to hand back the timeshare to the resort in 2011, and at that point only, two years later, did he manage to get the payments stopped.
The complaint that Mr & Mrs X made, was against Lloyds bank for not stopping their payments immediately when requested in 2009 as it led them into further debt. There was new banking legislation brought in in the year 2009 which stated that banks should allow their clients to cancel their payments. Lloyds asked that the ombudsmen to assure them that the client had not used their timeshare in the time that they were requesting the claim, and this was confirmed.
The original complaint was made by Mr & Mrs X through the section 75 act, which states that the client can claim back any monies paid through their credit card to a company if they believe that the company sold them a product/service other than that they believed they were purchasing. Seen as the clients already had one unit of timeshare, this option was not viable to claim against. Or that the resort had broken their contract with Mr & Mrs X, also not true. Therefore, the ombudsmen made a decision that the timeshare resort had not acted indecently even if they hadn’t been entirely clear.
The final decision of the ombudsmen was in favour of Mr & Mrs X’s claim against Lloyds bank for not halting their payments to the resort when asked in 2009. The ombudsmen believed it fair for the clients to be paid back a part of the monthly payments that were requested to be cancelled, due to the fact that they felt that if the payments had been cancelled Mr & Mrs X may have reached an agreement to get out of their timeshare unit previous to 2011.
The final decision was made that Lloyds bank were to pay back their clients half of the total payments made by credit card to the resort from the date of cancellation to the last payment for that one timeshare unit. This decision was made due to the fact that it would have probably taken time to cancel payments, and stop the resort from claiming the payments, so the ombudsmen reached the agreement of half the amount of monies paid, which totalled just over £11,000 including interests accrued. The clients still had over £9000 in debt with their card, so the ombudsmen declared that if they wrote off the credit card debt, the clients should be happy.
We at the TCA have reported on this to bring it to the attention of timeshare owners that there are other avenues that you can complain to when it comes to your money. If you are having no joy with the resort itself, always try other avenues before giving up completely. You could be just as lucky as Mr & Mrs X.
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