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Re: Re: Class Action Against Diamond Resorts? (by Irene P.):

The name of this forum needs to change because 1) Diamond has a class action ban written into their contract. The buyer agrees not to participate in a class action unless they opt-out of arbitration within 30 days of signing the contract. No one does. If arbitration were fair the member should be able to elect arbitration when a dispute arises, instead of being forced to arbitrate because they did not opt-out. Diamond pays their arbitrators $400 to $800 an hour. A judge is paid for by taxpayer dollars. An active duty Navy member could be separated from service after buying the minimum number of 2500 timeshare points from Diamond, the loan $10,000, the judgment against them is $66,000, the difference mostly Diamonds' attorneys fees, a cash cow for Diamond's arbitrators and 2) class actions based on fraud by inducement typically don't work I'm told because damages aren't uniform. One successful class action that recently settled was about Premier Vacation Points for owners like me who were overcharged maintenance fees, damages are uniform.

A quote from private equity Diamond CEO David Palmer from 2016 until he flipped the deal: What owners don't often know is that a big chunk of that money goes directly into the pocket of the company. Here's how the CEO, David Palmer, described it to investors in 2014, per the Times article:

"Anything that is put in the budget that gets expended on an annual basis, we get our 15 percent fee," Mr. Palmer explained to investors at a September 2014 conference, according to a transcript. "That is basically a 100 percent profit business."

Timeshare owners of the Grand Beach Resort, a 192-unit property in Orlando, Fla. ... learned in a letter in September that their annual maintenance fee would rise 14.9 percent this year.