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CONSUMER Affairs Minister Melanie Johnson has warned travellers to beware of holiday club touts - a month after Financial Mail and This Is Money published a similar alert.
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Holiday club salesmen are swarming around popular resorts in mainland Spain, the Canary Islands and Cyprus, enticing Britons to part with up to £10,000 to join holiday schemes.
In many cases, warns Johnson, these schemes are scams. 'Unscrupulous operators promise a lifetime of cheap holidays, but deliver nothing,' she says.
Holiday clubs differ from timeshare in that membership does not buy a set period in a particular resort. Instead, touts promise vague, flexible benefits such as discounted flights and accommodation in five-star resorts. Members are told they can book on websites that often turn out to be non-existent.
Holiday clubs lack the Europe-wide legal protection built in to timeshare sales. High-pressure salesmen do not allow a cooling-off period in which customers can change their minds.
Thousands of couples, such as pensioners Allan and Marion Baynham, from Newport, Gwent, regret signing up. The couple were on Spain's Costa del Sol in 2000 when they were talked into paying £8,300 to join a scheme operated by Incentive Leisure. They were promised - like many others - that they would get back their capital after 51 months through a deal arranged by a Gibraltar company called Reclaim.
Since then, Allan, 66, and Marion, 60, have taken two holidays. Allan says: 'The accommodation was certainly not five-star as promised.' Nor does he believe the trips were discounted. Reclaim, he has since discovered, is widely discredited. Now he is pressing his credit card company, Lloyds TSB, for a refund, though another Spanish-based firm, Club Class Holidays, is trying to get him to switch his membership to it.
But Sandy Grey of the Timeshare Consumer Association warns: 'It's possible that it's a variation of the same con. Holiday clubs make sales by preying on customers' dissatisfaction with other schemes.'
Thanks to more than 100 e-mails and letters from readers after our report on 2 June, Financial Mail can warn that salesmen have recently been operating around Malaga, Marbella and Benidorm in Spain, Paphos on Cyprus, and on the Canary Islands of Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Lanzarote.
Touts are young Britons who often ensnare victims with scratchcards that win them free holidays or champagne. The 'winners' are taken to nearby premises to collect their prizes and subjected to six-hour hard-sell sessions.
Financial Mail welcomes information about holiday club scams. Our findings will be published and passed to the Department of Trade and Industry, the police and authorities abroad.
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