Timesharing in Mexico
Jackie introduced herself with a smile, then glanced down at our paperwork and laughed. She said we were going to turn heads touring the resort: “Four young, single women! You have no idea how jealous of me the men are right now.”
Of course, Jackie was the obvious head-turner. She was a tiny-waisted woman in her early 20s with a swaying walk, a tan pantsuit that hugged her thighs, and flat-ironed black hair that bounced against her cheeks and drew attention to her mascara-ed eyes.
We -- her four clients -- looked like what we were: women who had barely rolled out of bed in time for the free breakfast and hotel credit we had been promised for touring the Mayan Palace resort -- a sprawling complex of timeshares, palm trees and boardwalks in the Mexican tourist city of Puerto Nuevo.
My three friends and I certainly didn't look like people who buy timeshares. Allie no longer had dreads, but she still looked like the kind of woman who would. The rest of us looked like we would be friends with someone with dreads. Lisa, the vegan who worked on forest trail crews, wore an old wrap skirt and a t-shirt. Dawn, the bike shop worker, wore a tank dress that showed off her bicep tattoo. I looked appropriately scruffy for a journalist, wearing a tank top and the same black skirt I'd worn the day before.
We were in town for a wedding of two friends from when we had all been in Peace Corps together. In retrospect, it was strange that we had decided to take a whole morning of the few days we had to catch up with old friends touring timeshares. But the calls had started coming from the front desk the morning we checked in at the Mayan Palace in Puerto Vallarta: would we be interested in touring the sister property in Puerto Nuevo? No. Would we be up for a free gourmet breakfast at the sister property? No. Would we be interested in $100 apiece that we could spend on things like massages and drinks at our current hotel? Well, we did have the morning before the wedding free anyway. And we'd be having fun doing anything as long as we were hanging out with each other. Right? So we made the deal.
My friends and I thought the tour would be fun – a lark. We so obviously didn’t belong that no one would bother trying to give us a hard sell.
Jackie led us out of the hotel's crowded reception room and toward an outdoor patio filled with hexagonal wooden picnic tables. She asked us about the traffic. We said it hadn’t been too bad, though we’d heard the bridge over to Puerta Nuevo was really crowded during rush hour.
“Oh my God,” Jackie said. “You have no idea. How much time it takes me each evening.” We asked if she lived on the other side of the bridge in Puerto Vallarta, where we were staying. No, she said, but she often went to the mall there, so she understood where we were coming from.
As Jackie led us to our table, we passed a number of other groups – couples and families mostly – sitting at their own hexagonal tables. Everyone had their own personal guide, most of them middle-aged men in boxy suits.
“This is going to be fun!" Jackie said. "Four ladies. You know, my boss is a woman. One of the few in this business.” She explained that she had to fill out some paperwork with us and then paused, and got serious.
“Ok ladies, here’s what I have to tell you,” she said, leaning in. “I know that no one comes here to buy. But this is my job: to show you our product. And I think we have a good product. So all I ask is that you let me do my job, let me show you my product, and then make your decision.” There was a visible relaxing around the hexagon. “Ok” “Yes” “Sure, of course.” We weren’t going to have to lie our way through this whole thing. Jackie gave us a way to talk to her without feeling guilty that she wasn’t going to make a sale. She had set ground rules that we could live with.
And so it became sort of fun. The resort was beautiful, in that way that resorts and cruise ships can be: comfortable, clean and catering. There was lagoon running through the whole property with a winding boardwalk lined with tropical plants and tasteful garden lights to illuminate the walkway in the evening. Jackie let us soak it all in as we walked.
Jackie pointed out the chunky heels she was wearing with her suit. She used to wear spike heels but they got caught in the spaces between the planks on the boardwalk. "Sometimes you gotta sacrifice fashion!" We all nodded in understanding as we looked down at our flip-flops.
Then Jackie made another deal with us. Jackie explained that she was going to have to give us "the pitch" but that she had a choice. She could save us all time by doing it over the free breakfast, or we could hang out and have a nice meal, just us girls enjoying ourselves, and then she'd go into sales mode later. We opted for the nice breakfast.
We sat at a sun-soaked table by the lagoon. Over smoked salmon and fresh orange juice, we chatted with Jackie the way one talks to a new acquaintance at a party. We explained that we had all met in the Peace Corps in West Africa and about the wedding that had brought us back together for a few days. Jackie couldn't relate to Africa, but she could relate to travel, so we talked about travel.
Yes, we allowed ourselves to feel a little superior, but we also pushed back against that impulse and found common ground. Jackie talked about trying to prove herself in the male-dominated profession of real-estate sales and we commiserated. After all, we were all women in our late 20s and early 30s who were still trying to figure out where work fit in our lives. Jackie explained that her father had been a race-car driver and her family had owned one of the condos at Mayan Palace when she was young. It was on a visit back to her parents that she realized that she could try selling the condos.
After breakfast, we toured some of the model units. They were lavish and we got into the role-playing of pretending that we were "in the market." It was actually sort of fun.
We walked through the resort's waterpark and Jackie said how great the place was for families. I laughed and said this was exactly the kind of place that I would have loved my parents to take me when I was a kid. Instead they took me camping. Jackie brightened at this and I realized that she had taken exactly the wrong message from it. I wasn't pining after the wave pool I didn't get to visit as a five-year-old. I was happy that my parents had taken me to national parks instead.
But except for a few missteps like that, hanging out with Jackie was fun. She asked us about men and our lives. Even though her life experiences were very different, she always something little she could relate to in our lives. When I said I was a reporter she told stories from when she was a weather girl at a TV station in Mexico City. I was going to visit a friend in Mexico City after the wedding and she gave me recommendations for what to see.
By 11 a.m. we were finishing up the tour. Not so bad for $100 and a free breakfast.
Then Jackie stopped on the boardwalk and asked The Question: "So ladies, I want to ask you. Do you see value in a place like this?" Here it was, the point at which we were going to have to admit that Jackie's timeshare world was the last place we'd want to spend a vacation, the point at which we would have to explain that we didn't value the things she valued. Then Lisa, the vegan with the biggest heart in the world, came up with the best answer possible: "I can see how it provides value for some people. I think it's good for some people. But it isn't the kind of thing I value."
Exhale.
We had made it through. We were ready to shake hands with Jackie say "Sorry, no sale" pick up our $100 vouchers and get on with our day. But she explained that we needed to sit down and go through a formal presentation first. So she took us to a cold room with folding tables and fluorescent lighting. Jackie pulled out a yellow legal pad and started suggesting numbers, always asking, "what do you think a timeshare in a place like this is worth?" She was particularly talented at holding the pad in front of her and writing numbers upside down. We kept saying, "Well, to us? this really isn't something we'd do." That was not the right answer. She got frustrated. We got flustered. We got a lot less nice.
Well, I got a lot less nice:
"Look," I said, "There is no amount of money that I would pay to stay in a place like this."
"What if I were to give you a free room to come back and stay in next time you're in Mexico?"
"I won't be back in Mexico. I'm only here for my friend's wedding."
"But you could use a timeshare in any of these other countries where we have partners."
"But I don't want a timeshare."
She pointed out cruises that we could take instead.
I laughed. "Oh my God!” I sneered. “We could take a cruise! It would be awesome!"
"So what you're saying," Jackie said, "Is that you think everything here that I'm doing is worthless. I'm just trying to make a living and sales is a way for me to do that and you think I'm a joke."
She got up and said she'd get us our $100 vouchers and let us go.
Blush.
Then, instead of Jackie, a man in his mid-30s sat down at the table. He explained that he was Jackie's boss and she had explained that we didn't want to buy. He just wanted to do a quick evaluation of Jackie since she was new and he wanted to make sure she had presented all the options. Then he'd get us our vouchers.
We got effusive: "Jackie was great!" "We love Jackie, it's just not for us." "She explained everything so well, we're just not interested." He pulled back out the yellow legal pad. There were more numbers. He was also very good at writing them upside down. We protested. "Look, Jackie did a great job, it's just that we're not interested." He said he understood and left to get our vouchers.
We looked around for Jackie. We wanted to say we were sorry. I apologized to my friends for losing my cool. I hadn't meant to tell her that I thought her whole world was worthless, but the problem was that I did. And she had kept pressing. But at least it was over now. We were going to get our vouchers and get out.
A woman showed up and asked us to follow her into the back office for those vouchers. We were taken into a waiting room filled with tourist brochures. Then we were shown into a small office with a very attractive Mexican man in a very nice suit. He invited us to sit down while our vouchers were being processed. He asked us about ourselves and explained that his family owned the Mayan Palace properties. We made small talk. He was cute. And then the yellow legal pad came back out.
"No, really, we're not interested. None of us." Fine, fine, he understood. And our vouchers were almost ready anyway.
He led us into another office, where a middle-aged American woman was waiting for us. She didn't smile. She sat sternly behind her desk like a school principal. She handed us evaluation forms to fill out while the handsome man was fetching our vouchers. Evaluation forms -- finally our chance to get in a good word for Jackie. As we wrote, the woman said she understood why we didn't want timeshares -- they were a waste of money. That's why SHE participated in a different program that allowed outright ownership among just a few select properties. The yellow legal pad came out again.
"No, really, we don't want any of this. We just want to fill out the forms. Jackie was great. We're just not interested."
"Well obviously she didn't do a good job. She didn't make the sale."
Silence.
And then it ended. The yellow legal pads disappeared and the vouchers appeared. The Mayan palace had sent a car to bring us for the tour but we had to arrange a taxi to take us back. We asked the taxi driver just to take us to the nearest beach.
We walked on the beach out in the real world, or as real as it gets in a tourist town. There were trinket sellers with dingy booths and women offering massages for a few bucks. The sunlight felt too bright after the hour we had spent in those conference rooms.
"I feel dirty," my friend Dawn said.
I dug my toes into the wet sand and tried to adjust my eyes to the light.
I thought about Jackie: had she really been a weather girl? Had her father really been a race-car driver? Had I actually offended her? I sort of hoped I had. I wanted something to be real.
