Wyndham to refund retirees’ money
Wyndham Vacation Ownership has agreed to cancel the contract of a Canadian couple who claimed they were railroaded into handing over a portion of their retirement fund for a timeshare deal while vacationing in Orlando.
Sharon Morrison, 69, and her husband, Donald, said they reluctantly agreed to sign a $25,000 timeshare contract after a four-hour sales pitch that wore down the couple’s resistance and skepticism.
Upon returning home and speaking to their children, the couple realized they had made a mistake and couldn’t afford the contract. At first, Wyndham only offered to put them in a program that eventually would allow them to sell their timeshare.
After an article in the Orlando Sentinel that mentioned the Morrisons, however, Wyndham contacted the couple and offered to cancel the contract quickly.
“We could not afford this and realized we made a horrible mistake,” Sharon Morrison said.
A spokeswoman for Wyndham confirmed that the couple was being considered a hardship case and eligible for cancellation.
The timeshare industry, like many others, has roared back from the Great Recession. The American Resort Development Association, ARDA, says 9.2 million households in the U.S., or about 6.9 percent of all households, own some type of timeshare.
“They were very pushy,” Sharon Morrison said about the Wyndham pitch. “We paid them $25,000 and gave them our credit card information. A lot of our retirement money is gone.”
GrayRobinson lobbying hire
Kim McDougal, former chief of staff to Gov. Rick Scott, is joining GrayRobinson’s government relations team as a senior director of government affairs in Tallahassee. She will advise and lobby for clients. McDougal also worked for Jeb Bush in several roles within the Executive Office of the Governor, including as the policy coordinator for education in the Office of Planning and Budget.
She was in Scott’s administration for almost four years, beginning as a special advisor on education.
Gardens bankruptcy
Financial trouble for the Parliament House, a 40-year-old gay-themed resort on Orlando’s west side, isn’t letting up.
The resort itself emerged from bankruptcy last year, but fell into a foreclosure lawsuit again in December which is still pending. This week, a neighboring and related development called The Gardens LLC, a timeshare condo, has filed a Chapter