$150 Phone Call

The timeshare company stuck us with the wrong dates for our condo! Then they said if we wanted to change, we’d have to pay the $150 fee again.

That chapped my ass. I really don’t want to be at Table Rock Lake on July 4th. Then again, the only reason we’re even going there is the “free” condo. It starts to get a lot less appealing if we’ve got to throw money away on ridiculous fees.

So I had Xy call them up and pretend to be her grandmother. (The condo belongs to Grandma.) Then she handed the phone over to me and I went to work.

At first the rep was entirely unsympathetic. She warned that I’d have to forfeit the $150 we’d already paid, with no guarantee of being able to get the dates we wanted.

I stayed calm, reasonable, polite — but persistent: “Well, could you check please? Well, I really don’t think we should be charged a fee. Well, is there any way you can waive that? Well, I really wish you could make an exception in this case.”

Eventually the rep put me on hold, for a looong time, and when she came she said they’d make a one-time exception.

New dates, no fee.

It seems absurd, but this made my evening.