Author: gregjsmith

Since I will be starting school next week I thought it would be a good idea to make a another trip back home before it starts. As my Girlfriend and I were planning the trip we got a “invitation” in the mail to The Weston in Scottsdale for about $250 for 3 nights. Their rooms usally go for around $300 a night. What was the catch? We had to listen to a 90 minute time share sales pitch.

The Westin isn’t just a Hotel it’s a double fancy hotel, full name is “The Westin Kierland Resort and Spa”, located in the center of fancyville Scottsdale. Putting the “Resort and Spa” at the end of their name means that they can charge for everything and charge a lot. For example there was a refrigerator with booze and soda in it. They also had a little basket with snack foods (and no vending machines anywhere in the hotel). The Snickers bar in that basket was $4.00. They left a list of all these things so we could check off what we used and at the bottom the not only wanted us to included Arizona’s 8.1% tax but a 21% gratuity. We choose not to use any of their stuff. The whole hotel was pretty much like this. The spa was overpriced, the restaurants were over priced. We ended up not spending much time a the hotel for this reason.

The hotel was huge, we were on the 7th floor. Our room wasn’t very big was never the less very comfortable. The bathroom was very nice, the shower was separate from the bathtub and there was plenty of water pressure. The shower was clogged but they came and fixed it quickly after we called them. They also have what the call their “Heavenly Bead”, it’s the most comfortable hotel bed I’ve ever slept on and it’s almost as good as our own bed. Apparently you can buy this bed online but I couldn’t find the link.

If your in to golfing (which I’m not) they have a massive golf course. It’s very green and pretty. They also had a bike trail if we do ever stay there again we may find a way to bring our bikes.

Now for the sales pitch. I have to say that they had very compelling offer. The time share is sold by the hotel, they call it “vacation ownership“.

Here’s how it works:

• You purchase a condo style room at a home site, in this case it’s the Scottsdale Westin.
• You purchase so many days a year (in our case they were trying to sell us 7 days)
• Since it’s with the Starwood resorts you can use the days you bought at any other Starwood resort or
• You can trade the time with a service that deals with this sort of thing and use your time at a non Starwood resort, the cost the quoted us was about $150 to do this or
• You can buy hotel time at any Starwood per night for $99 per night. That includes any of their properties including the W Hotels where presidents and other famous people stay. I can say it costs much more than $99 a night at these places though it wasn’t clear which rooms we would get.
• You get a deed to your property and you pay a mortgage. That means you can write it off as a second home and once it’s paid off your done.
• The cost for our “deal” was about $10,000, 10% interest and about $150 a month for 120 months.

The cost was certainly some we could afford but had I been in the market for such a thing (as I told the sales guys right at the start that we were not) although I would have talked them down on the interest rate and some of the other details. But lets face it, we went for the cheap hotel room when we were already going to spend that money somewhere on a hotel and for the chance to stay at a fancy hotel.