Email: Aid to go to Westgate promotions
Company denies it offered jobs to bloggers
An executive at Westgate Resorts, the timeshare company run by Orlando businessman David Siegel, offered to use coronavirus relief money from the federal government to give short-term jobs to travel bloggers to write stories promoting the company’s resorts, according to an email obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
The email, promising the recipient “THIS IS NOT A JOKE OR A SCAM,” said, “We have federal money available to us at our company, to hire temporary employees.”
Asked this week about the offer by the Sentinel, a senior Westgate executive — Chief Operating Offi
cer Mark Waltrip — acknowledged in an email that the company has received money through the federal government’s “Paycheck Protection Program,” an emergency program meant to help the country’s smallest businesses continue paying their employees during the COVID-19 economic collapse.
But Waltrip said the company has not used any of that money to temporarily hire outside travel writers.
“Westgate Resorts, like many other hospitality companies, had to shut down many of its operations across the country and reduce its workforce by thousands of team members,” Waltrip wrote in the email. “Westgate applied for and was approved to receive money under the Paycheck Protection Program for those resorts that qualified, and we promptly hired back thousands of team members to begin working at those resorts again.”
Shortly after Waltrip emailed his statement to the Sentinel, the Westgate executive who had offered to temporarily hire travel writers emailed the newspaper separately to say he had been mistaken in his initial offer.
“The company isn’t using PPP funds to hire bloggers,” said Alex Velazquez, Westgate’s director of search engine optimization.
Westgate executives declined to be interviewed and would not answer specific questions — including how many PPP loans the company has obtained or how much money it has received through the program. The Trump administration, which is overseeing the nearly $700 billion small-business lending program, has refused to publicly disclose the identities of all PPP recipients.
Westgate calls itself the largest privately held timeshare company in the world, with two dozen properties and more than 14,500 timeshare suites and hotel rooms in its network. The company does about $1.2 billion in annual revenue and had about 6,100 employees before the pandemic erupted, according to Florida Trend magazine. Siegel, the company’s founder, CEO and president, is a multimillionaire best known for his and his wife’s years-long attempt to build one of the largest mansions in the United States.
Westgate sent the nowdisavowed job offer to the owner of an Orlando tourism website late last month. The owner of the site, who asked not to be identified, provided the Sentinel with a copy of it.
In it, Velazquez wrote that the company had just gained access to money through the “CARES Act” — the roughly $2 trillion economic rescue package that Congress approved in late March to staunch the economic hemorrhaging caused by the coronavirus — and planned to use the money to hire some temporary workers.
Specifically, Velazquez offered to have Westgate hire one or two of the website’s own employees. Westgate would pay them $16 an hour for 32 hours a week over eight weeks in exchange for writing five “guest blog posts” ranking the best hotels in several markets — each with a Westgate hotel ranked as the top option.
The offers makes clear that the writers would become Westgate employees but that their employment would end in eight weeks.
Eight weeks is a key time frame under the Paycheck Protection Program.
Companies won’t have to repay their PPP loans as long as they spend enough money on wages and keep enough workers on staff. And the measurement period is based on the amount of wages paid and people employed over the eight weeks that begin once a company receives its loan proceeds.
Waltrip, Westgate’s chief operating officer, said in his statement to the Sentinel that Westgate has recently assembled a social media and marketing “task force” to produce “positive content” about community service programs that Westgate employees are implementing around the country.
“This marketing team and associated program is funded 100 percent by Westgate and no PPP funds will be used for this effort,” Waltrip said.