Boutique Resort La Jolla Mazatlan are Criminals !!

[ahathaway]

I Have reached a settlement with La Jolla

[Missie]

They are absolutely criminals! The manager of La Jolla just admitted to me over the phone that yes, he took our $3000 14 months ago and there is nothing that we can do about it. We never even bought a timeshare with them, only registered for HSI who says we have nothing with them either. So we have NOTHING and CIBC VISA will not even fight for us. So absolutely do not deal with La Jolla!

[J_Guenther]

My wife and I just returned to Canada after our trip in Mazatlan. I began my due-diligence and researched La Jolla. I am incredibly upset to find message boards like this!

We paid a deposit of $5125 USD in exchange for 4 weeks per year that we signed over to La Jolla as "marketing weeks." We were told we would be paid $1700 USD per week in exchange for allowing the resort to use the time for marketing purposes, for a total of $6800 USD per year.

We set up a payment plan to pay the remainder of the fee of $3125 USD that will begin on October 1st, 2010.

We were informed that La Jolla earns a significant amount of money from the marketing weeks by bringing in "high-earning" selected clients that in turn purchase significant plans in comparison to ours. That way, even though they are paying us money for the weeks, they earn that back ten-fold. It sounded like good reasoning to us.

In the meantime, we are "expecting" a cheque for $6800 USD that is supposed to arrive in mid-September for the marketing weeks for 2010. On the 45th day of every subsequent year (Feb. 14th) we will receive the marketing money for that year's 4 weeks. This was negotiated to occur for the next five years, after that, the fees would be re-negotiated and the marketing fee could be higher or lower. We would also have an opportunity to sell back the weeks to the company minus 5% at this time.

After being told that the marketing weeks would be paid for by a company called Premier Vacations, we were given their contact information and were told we would be contacted by them the day after we returned from Mazatlan.

When I returned home, I received a call, but not from anyone at Premier Vacations, but from Alfredo Marcq, the manager who supervised our sale. He notified me that the cheque would be coming shortly and that I will be contacted by Premier Vacations within 10-15 days. No such contact has occurred.

I checked the website supplied (www.premier-vacations.com) and found that the website domain is for sale, meaning that there is no active website there! I phoned the number provided (1-925-954-5466) and left a message, but I do not expect a phone call back.

So my wife and I, who are young and newly married, are at a complete loss as to what to do next. I have already emailed PROFECO per some of the posts on boards I have read, and I am awaiting contact from them. I have also contacted VISA and begun the process of reporting a fraudulent purchase. I do not know if they can do anything for me, but I figure I should do anything and everything that I can to recover my money. In the meantime, I will continue to post on as many message boards as I can find, as well as posting on Trip Advisor to warn others of this scam! Please, if anybody has further advice for me, please post! Thank you.

Joshua G.

[Renaelarcus]

I, too, had a dispute with the criminals at La Jolla Resort in Mazatlan. They forged a document waiving my right to the "cooling off period", so when (less than 24 hours after purchasing and after seeing countless posts of their unscrupulous practices on the Internet) we tried to cancel our contract, they said we could not. Our option was to accept 50% of our money($7200) back and try to get the rest through the PROFECO. We declined that offer, feeling that we could stop payment through the dispute process with our credit card company, Barclay's.

Long story short, we got NO SATISFACTION from Barclay's and we were given conflicting advice from Barclay's reps regarding the best way to go about a resolution. A letter with pages of documentation was fruitless. Here is what we did, and our case was resolved in LESS THAN 10 DAYS:

1. Wrote a letter to the President of Barclay's with pages of documentation including letters, copies of emails and other documents pertinent to the case.
2. I cc'd the Phoenix -based management company that La Jolla claims they use.
3. I cc'd the Better Business Bureau and filed a claim again the management company here in Phoenix.
4. I cc'd the local Phoenix Newspaper
5. I cc'd and emailed our local NewsChannel 3 consumer advocate who regularly helps people with disputes in a segment called "3 On Your Side".

Number 5 was the winner. TEN minutes after emailing the Channel 3 Consumer Advocate, named Gary, he called me and the wheels started turning. I provided him with all of the documentation I had. I gave him a detailed account of the case from the day we met with La Jolla, to the day I emiled him. He sent a camera crew to my house to interview me and he started making calls to the appropriate people at the credit card co.

The story was scheduled to air on the news yesterday, even though we did not yet have a resolution to the case. At 1pm, a representative of Barclay's called and said that my card was being credited $7200 and the case was closed. They would deal with the merchant and they felt that the case would be dead because La Jolla will not go through the necessary paperwork to fight it. They will just move on to the next tourist victim.

Gary's camerman got more footage of me saying how thrilled I was that this was resolved and the whole thing aired on the 5:30pm news. Case closed. If my case and the new story can save one person from going through this, it was worth it. I was expecting a 1-2 year fight and it ended up taking only 10 days after I contacted the TV station.

If you are caught in this same struggle, it is worth a try.

[grandpa1]

Unfortunately our dealings with this resort were dreadful, too and while we hired a lawyer and terminated the contract within the legally required period of 5 days, we still have not received one of our two deposits back The deal was originally made in March 2010.
VISA was most helpful and took care of one of our deposits and after an arbitration hearing at their offices decided that we were right and credited some $5,000 to our VISA account. Regarding the second deposit of approx. $6,000 through BoM Mastercard, we received no help from the Credit Card company and have finally turned it over to PROFECO, WHO HAD OFFERED TO HELP BUT HAVE MADE NO GUARANTEES.
To take this matter to court through a lawyer would cost at least 20% of the amount challenged and we will leave tht as the last alternative.
We cancelled our contract because we learned after making the deal of several cases where La Jolla had not honoured their agreements and the risk seemed to be too high to continue.
We warn anyone dealing with Boutique La Jolla to be extremely cautious when entering into a contract adn if there are any doubts, to terminate the contarct withinn the 5 day period provided for the consumer's protection by the Mexican Law. Even though we terminated under this provision, you can see we are still having problems with getting all our money back.
Good Luck, grandpa1

[Robert Peck]

Just so you know we fell into the same trap. We are out 5 times the amount of money you loss. If you have any updates on who to contact or an attorney that we can utilize please advise. Robert P

Originally Posted by J_Guenther

My wife and I just returned to Canada after our trip in Mazatlan. I began my due-diligence and researched La Jolla. I am incredibly upset to find message boards like this!

We paid a deposit of $5125 USD in exchange for 4 weeks per year that we signed over to La Jolla as "marketing weeks." We were told we would be paid $1700 USD per week in exchange for allowing the resort to use the time for marketing purposes, for a total of $6800 USD per year.

We set up a payment plan to pay the remainder of the fee of $3125 USD that will begin on October 1st, 2010.

We were informed that La Jolla earns a significant amount of money from the marketing weeks by bringing in "high-earning" selected clients that in turn purchase significant plans in comparison to ours. That way, even though they are paying us money for the weeks, they earn that back ten-fold. It sounded like good reasoning to us.

In the meantime, we are "expecting" a cheque for $6800 USD that is supposed to arrive in mid-September for the marketing weeks for 2010. On the 45th day of every subsequent year (Feb. 14th) we will receive the marketing money for that year's 4 weeks. This was negotiated to occur for the next five years, after that, the fees would be re-negotiated and the marketing fee could be higher or lower. We would also have an opportunity to sell back the weeks to the company minus 5% at this time.

After being told that the marketing weeks would be paid for by a company called Premier Vacations, we were given their contact information and were told we would be contacted by them the day after we returned from Mazatlan.

When I returned home, I received a call, but not from anyone at Premier Vacations, but from Alfredo Marcq, the manager who supervised our sale. He notified me that the cheque would be coming shortly and that I will be contacted by Premier Vacations within 10-15 days. No such contact has occurred.

I checked the website supplied (www.premier-vacations.com) and found that the website domain is for sale, meaning that there is no active website there! I phoned the number provided (1-925-954-5466) and left a message, but I do not expect a phone call back.

So my wife and I, who are young and newly married, are at a complete loss as to what to do next. I have already emailed PROFECO per some of the posts on boards I have read, and I am awaiting contact from them. I have also contacted VISA and begun the process of reporting a fraudulent purchase. I do not know if they can do anything for me, but I figure I should do anything and everything that I can to recover my money. In the meantime, I will continue to post on as many message boards as I can find, as well as posting on Trip Advisor to warn others of this scam! Please, if anybody has further advice for me, please post! Thank you.

Joshua G.

[grandpa1]

Originally Posted by grandpa1

Unfortunately our dealings with this resort were dreadful, too and while we hired a lawyer and terminated the contract within the legally required period of 5 days, we still have not received one of our two deposits back The deal was originally made in March 2010.
VISA was most helpful and took care of one of our deposits and after an arbitration hearing at their offices decided that we were right and credited some $5,000 to our VISA account. Regarding the second deposit of approx. $6,000 through BoM Mastercard, we received no help from the Credit Card company and have finally turned it over to PROFECO, WHO HAD OFFERED TO HELP BUT HAVE MADE NO GUARANTEES.
To take this matter to court through a lawyer would cost at least 20% of the amount challenged and we will leave tht as the last alternative.
We cancelled our contract because we learned after making the deal of several cases where La Jolla had not honoured their agreements and the risk seemed to be too high to continue.
We warn anyone dealing with Boutique La Jolla to be extremely cautious when entering into a contract adn if there are any doubts, to terminate the contarct withinn the 5 day period provided for the consumer's protection by the Mexican Law. Even though we terminated under this provision, you can see we are still having problems with getting all our money back.
Good Luck, grandpa1

Sep/01/11
We may have reached satisfactory settlement with La Jolla and as soon as we will have received our funds we will remove our original message. grandpa1

[Rick Lasker]

Originally Posted by Robert Peck

Just so you know we fell into the same trap. We are out 5 times the amount of money you loss. If you have any updates on who to contact or an attorney that we can utilize please advise. Robert P

Dear Mr. Robert Peck,

Depending of your reasons to cancelled the timeshare, date of purchased and other factors you maybe entitled to get a refund of monies paid. Specially if you cancelled within your 5 business day period.

For inquiries please contact me, I'm at your service.

Rick Lasker.