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ask-redweek-hilton-buys-diamond-resorts (by Vaz T.):

Hello my name is Vazgen. We owned DRI membership for more than10 years now. We started with a "sampler" and throughout the years were coerced and lied to buy more points, to buy "US collection points", to buy "Hawaii Collection " points, and then to convert everything into "Hawaii collection" because it had better value because there were limited amount of properties in Hawaii. Every time it costs us more and more money and in the end we had purchased 51,000 points to become Platinum membership owners and one of the sells reps even went out of his way to give us a "secret" advice, that he could loose his job for telling us about it, that a few years down the road we could sell 25K point to someone as a Gold Membership with the price of the Platinum membership we paid for and still be a Gold Membership owner with $0 cost. Fast forward during the pandemic I reached out the DRI trying to sell 25K of my points because of financial hardship. They told me that it is one account and I can't sell part of it. I tried to work out a deal with them to give 25K points back to them , because the maintenance fees were over 10K a year. They still did not agree because a still have balance on the loan. I could negotiate a deal with them after I pay the $35K balance. And even then I had to forfeit all of the membership. That was the end of the conversation. Today I had a zoom meeting with the HGV rep to go over our benefits and how to maximize our membership. And , of course it turned into a sales presentation and if we want to maximize our benefits we had to buy more points. The amazing part was that we supposedly did not pay our maintenance fees and our membership was downgraded from 51K platinum points to 18,500 Silver membership. And to get to HGV club we had to buy minimum of 2000 points for $12,833 or better to get 3500 point for $20,141 for gold membership, and I had to do it today. I did not agree to anything and I told them "I have to sleep on this". She will call me back tomorrow at noon. I'm just puzzled that how DRI could cancel part of my points but not all for not paying maintenance fees ! When I voiced my concerns , she said that this has foreclosed right before Hilton took over and when I asked her if she could provide me with number that I could speak to someone at DRI, she told me that Dimond does not exist anymore and I can not change anything about a foreclosure that happened two years ago. Now that I read all this comments, I understand that this is as fishy as it gets. They are asking HGV club owners to upgrade their membership to be able to use DRI properties and DRI members to spend more money to upgrade their membership to use Hilton properties. Only a "Class Action Lawsuit" can solve this problem, this is above any individual's abilities to take on a large company on their own.