Timeshare Heaven, Part 1

We began our stay in Cabo as many American tourists do - by becoming hapless victims of the timeshare sales vultures at the airport. They make it seem like you will not be able to secure transportation to your destination unless you talk to them first. We were sort of half committed to listening to a timeshare thing because we heard so many rumors about the perks that came along with it, so we allowed ourselves to be dragged over to the counter where we were supposedly arranging our taxi. For those of you who don’t want to endure the pitching, the secret is to walk through the pit viper nest repeating the words “I’m already an owner” and they will leave you alone.

I was really kind of intrigued by the whole process, because clearly it’s the lifeblood of this town. The volume of people dedicated to selling you one-fiftieth of one hotel room is astounding. Enter Hiram, level one airport sales guy. He was good. He knew right off that we were half skeptics and he talked to us as such - didn’t pull any punches and told us straight up what he was after. The perk that sold us was when he pulled out the Eco Adventures magazine and promised us tickets to that - I really wanted to do something like that while we were here anyway, might as well do it for free. He added on a steak and lobster dinner and a trip in the glass bottom boats, all for 75 minutes of our time the next day. Unfortunately this involved actually getting out of bed before noon but we figured one day of that wouldn’t kill us. The last part of the deal was the trickiest. We had to give him 40 bucks, as collateral for our presence. This one was new to me, and pretty smart I thought. 40 bucks is a low enough amount that you will part with it now, but high enough to get your butt out of bed and over there the next day, because that is what I was thinking about when the alarm went off.

Next came Hiram’s instructions for getting ourselves there. We are staying in a place that is far out of town and fairly secluded. There is no way to just walk down the hall to the lobby and catch a cab - it’s a complicated process of ordering a golf cart, then getting a cab to the exit, etc. Hiram informed us that of course our hotel wouldn’t want him there trying to sell us on a different place, so he had to meet us at the entrance. But….we were not to actually tell anyone that we were meeting him, because they would try and steal the deal out from under him. It’s phenomenally competitive. We keep hearing over and over how cutthroat these first level sales guys are, really amazing. So we followed his instructions to the letter, telling the golf cart driver we wanted a taxi, telling the concierge we wanted to go downtown, then lying to him when he asked if anyone was meeting us at the gate, and then not telling the taxi driver about it until we were clear of the concierge. We felt like drug runners. As the cab got to the bottom of the hill, we realized there were about 10 Hirams there, waiting for people like us. Crazy! A guy came over and opened our door. We told him we were looking for Hiram, and he said oh I work with him, remember me? From the airport, hold on, I’ll call him. Well we’d already been told they do this to scam each other out of prospects so by now we’re like crap what do we do? But then we saw the actual Hiram pulling up and he was actually talking to the guy in our doorway on his cell phone. Phew. He sent us along with a taxi voucher and off we went to Villas de Palmar….

Stay tuned for Part 2. I might even figure out how to upload pictures by then.