So I''ve lived in Florida my entire life so I know how bad Time Shares are. We had friends of the family buy one in the 1990s and I remember the hell they went through to get out of it.
Apparently Hilton has one and they threw enough Hilton points at my Wife (plus a free stay) that it made sense to sit through the presentation. I was also curious about how they spun these to make sense to anyone so off we went.
Like I said I know Timeshares are bad but OMG.. here's the initial offer we were shown for a Timeshare that would get us about 2 weeks at various Hilton Properties:
$60,000 buy in @ 15% Interest plus closing costs plus a yearly maintenance fee in excess of $2,000. This maintenance fee is not locked in and can (and will) go up.
Doing the math on the maintenance fee alone made it come to about $180 a night for 2 weeks of Hotel Stays. Now you can book these time shares like a normal hotel if they have vacancies.. so checking online the two in Orlando were available for between $120-$150 a night. So this deal was to pay $60,000+ for the privledge of over paying for a Hotel Room. What the hell man, I mean seriously.
When we balked at this they did show us a 2nd offer for less points and a $9,000 buy in.. but the maintenance fee was still over $1,000 a year so with the reduced stays you were probably still at that $180/night rate on maintenance a lone.
We were out of there in 44 minutes (my wife started a timer when they started the presentation). I'd say how do they ever sell these but we have a friend (who is ironically cheap as hell) buy into the Wyndam vacation club (timeshare) last year to the tune of around $8,000. He says he likes it but also told us how he had to switch hotels several times on a recent visit to Atlanta because they couldn't get a single room for 4 days.