We recently heard about something called boiling frog syndrome.
Yup – sounds awful. And it is.
Just like if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it will try to hop out right away. But if you put the frog in a pot of cold water and gradually raise the temperature to boiling it will, supposedly, stay in the pot until it dies.
The phrase also is used to describe how people will put up with small detrimental changes that, over time, end up having dire consequences.
We thought this sounded a little familiar when reading a recent complaint about Capital Vacations. It even sounded like their sales agents are spreading boiled frog syndrome – on purpose.
Joseph is an owner who have filed a complaint against Capital Vacations with the Better Business Bureau. He suffered some truly sickening consequences through his exposure to Capital Vacations reps.
“Capital Vacations deliberately misled us with inaccurate information to manipulate us into buying more timeshare, and we are just fed up with them.”
“We owned a timeshare that, in 2023, we were advised at a presentation could be transferred from Stormy Point to Capital Vacations, which would help alleviate maintenance costs that were going to sharply rise under Stormy Point.”
“This cost us over $12,500.00, but we did it at the encouragement of Capital.”
Can you feel things getting hotter?
“But then, in 2024, we went to an owner training meeting where we were supposed to be trained on how to better use the website to get the most out of ownership.”
“It was here where the rep explained that we hadn’t actually paid to transfer ownership at all!”
What????
“That rep told us that what we had paid for was just a lousy one-year trial, and to fully transfer to Capital, it’d cost another $16,000.00.”
An additional $16,000? Now things were really heating up.
“His supervisor confirmed this, and told us we’d be on the hook for maintenance payments to BOTH Capital and Stormy Point unless we did this.”
TWO sets of maintenance fees – for the same timeshare?
Now it is Joseph who is boiling!
“Everywhere we turn, Capital Vacations reps have been willing to say anything and everything to squeeze more money out of us.”
The worst thing is, rather than spreading boiling frog syndrome to its customers, Capital Vacations is supposed to be inoculating them from this type of behavior by following the Code of Ethics of the American Resort Developers Association (ARDA), the timeshare industry trade association.
The code states: “All Members shall conduct their activities honestly and fairly in compliance with applicable laws, and with professionalism, integrity, dignity and propriety.”
ARDA’s Ethics Committee should be aggressively treating the boiling frog syndrome Capital Vacations is transmitting. Our prognosis: that seems unlikely, since ARDA’s own ethics code requires that only representatives from its timeshare company members can be ethics committee members.
And ARDA’s Resort Owners Coalition, which says it represents the timeshare owners, can’t be counted on to examine this most recent outbreak. Its board of directors includes Travis Bary, the co-president of Capital Vacations, and Ken McKelvey, an executive consultant to Capital Vacations.
We wonder if Travis and Ken are capable of even a little self-diagnosis. Let’s email them at
tbary@capitalvacations.com and klm@capitalvacations.com to ask what they would prescribe for such a severe case of conflict of interest.
And we should be paging Jason Gamel, the President and CEO of ARDA, for a consultation. Email him at jgamel@arda.org to see if he is doing anything to curb the prevalence of boiling frog syndrome among his members.
Does your timeshare company make you boiling mad? Use the contact information in this list of ARDA VIPs to let off some steam with your company’s leaders.
Plagued by timeshare company misbehavior? Check in with us at info@timesharefacts.com.
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