I was taken by a honeymoon scam

created by PureDoxyk

(thing) by PureDoxyk (7.2 mon) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Mon Jun 05 2000 at 17:58:02

Of course, I'm sure the folks propogating this scam would say it's no such thing. I, being solidly on the shit end of their deal, beg to differ.

Yes, I just got married, in case that's a surprise and you need a moment to compute it.

I "won" my honeymoon. That is, some chick called me on the phone a few months before my big day and TOLD me that I'd won my honeymoon. An 8-day vacation, she said, all-inclusive, with a cruise to the Bahamas in there. All my meals and activities, as long as I was on the resort, would be taken care of. All I had to worry about was alcohol and transportation ("You mean plane tickets?" I asked. "Yes, that and like, taxis if you want to get around on your own", she said.) Oh, and we were asked to take a tour of the third stop on our vacation--a Ramada in Orlando. Um, whatever; I figured we'd just skip it.

All for only three hundred bucks a piece for my new husband and myself. We were planning on taking a vacation to Jamaica through an all-inclusive resort anyway, because frankly I like the idea of not having to budget a lot while I'm on vacation. I like things that are included. And Jamaica would have been more like seven or eight hundred a piece...So we paid our six hundred. We got a videotape in the mail shortly thereafter, which showed very beautiful resort rooms and huge cruise-liners. It also assured us that our food was taken care of as long as we were in the resorts' numerous restaurants; that the resort activities were all included too, and in general that we would have a wonderful time.

Well, the itinerary didn't come in the mail until about two weeks before the wedding, so the plane tickets were expensive--another six hundred, actually. Oh well. I brushed that off because I REALLY NEEDED a vacation at the time. Then we got there, and hoo boy.

Meals, they informed us on our first day there, were not included, except while one was on the cruise. We, the honeymooners, had their cheapest room with a cool parking-lot view, and the food was expensive (in the one restaurant they had). We found a 7-11 and stocked up on nukables. Oh, and we had to take a tour at THIS resort too--in fact, if we didn't take it (at 9 a.m., no less), we didn't get to go on the cruise.
The tour was not ninety minutes like they said and it was not a tour. It was a two-and-a-half-hour sales pitch that got increasingly annoying, and which we, of course, had to tolerate in order to get on the boat. Oh, and activities were not only NOT included, they were almost twice as expensive on the Radisson's private beach as they were on the public beaches--we checked. So four of our eight days were spent at this stupid place, trying real hard not to be pissy on our honeymoon.

Then, boat time. The place we had to go to get on the boat was an hour and a half away, and they didn't feel like running any shuttles or buses, even though most of the people there were going on the cruise too (they trapped all us "promotional" people at once). It was $110 each way for a taxi. We rented a car for $140.

Hey, I gotta hand it to them, the boat food was superb. Of course, the "2-day cruise to the Bahamas" was a boat that left Tuesday night and got back Thursday at the butt-crack of dawn, leaving us about six hours on the island. It was not a big boat. It was a medium-sized boat, and it was definitely NOT the boat in the video. Oh, and they didn't tell us this until we were boarded, but there are no public beaches on the particular island we were going to (that being Nassau), so if we wanted a beach we had to pay 20-40 bucks a head for a ferry or something. Fuck it; we walked around the island. It wasn't like we had that much time to blow.

The rest of the time, we were in our room--a six-by-nine closet with a really uncomfortable bed and such a tiny bathroom that my husband couldn't even fit in the shower...alone. Oh, and the carpet was fucking disgusting. I mean, ew.

Next we were faced with the third leg of our journey--another resort. Well, now that we knew that meals weren't *really* included, that we'd have a shit room AND that we'd have to find our way the four hours to Orlando on our OWN (four hundred bills for a taxi THAT way)...we gave up and came home early. Mind you, that cost a pretty penny too.

We, of course, are filing a formal complaint and getting our fucking money back. But I would like to warn you all about big resorts and promotional vacations and generally about truth in advertising---it does not exist. I promise.

P.S. I do have to strongly recommend Carribean weed, as well as thank it for letting me have some fun anyway!

printable version
chaos

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