Anyone traveling to the Cancun/Riviera Maya area needs to know the following information:
My story:
After my parents and I landed at the Cancun airport, we were led to the place where we were supposed to pick up the van to escort us to our hotel in Riviera Maya. There were people holding up signs for all the local hotels, so naturally we followed the person for our hotel, The Valentin Imperial Maya. A young woman led us to a kiosk and took out a map of the area. She showed us where everything was and was very helpful. Then she started talking about The Mayan Palace. She told us that most hotels in the area generate revenue for other countries, but the Mayan Palace was Mexican owned and Mexico needs the money to go back into their country. She said that if we went to The Mayan Palace for a free breakfast and short presentation, we would receive a big discount on tour tickets. This interested my parents who ended up buying tickets at a discount through The Mayan Palace for the Chichen Itza tour. We agreed to go to the breakfast and “presentation” the next day.
The next day someone came to pick us at our hotel and drove us over to The Mayan Palace. We were starving when we first got there and they made us spend about an hour filling out paperwork and asking my parents about their yearly income and work schedules. Then we were led by a nice man to breakfast, which I have to admit was delicious. After breakfast and telling us about his large family, he gave us a tour of the premises and we ended up in a big conference room filled with tables of other innocent travelers being grilled about timeshares. My parents aren’t dumb so they kept giving excuses about why we could not have a timeshare. They also told the man that they would not agree to anything without having our lawyer look at it first. We ended up in the place for about two hours until we finally got up and left. This ruined our first day in Riviera Maya.
Don’t believe me? Listen to this traveler’s account:
Of course we were practically abducted at the airport by the timeshare salesmen. Once we agreed to the 90 minute breakfast and “tour’. That is the point all pleasantries ended. They did not tell us it was 45 minutes from cancun in the middle of nowhere and NO decent beach… They try to make up for that with decent pools.. But come on, you go to cancun area you want beaches. There are plenty of super nice ones at other places. We already own a timeshare so we were only interested in seeing the property to plan a future trip. The sales presentation was a total scam… WOW… I have never seen anything quite so aggressive. We had to finally ask to be taken back to our hotel.
