Jonas Bernholm
newbie
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- Jun 22, 2018
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- Wyndham Club
Club Wyndham Collapse (WYND)
[This post has been split off into its own thread]
I used to be a reporter for 10 years (2005-2015) at the largest stock market magazine in Scandinavia ( called “Aktiespararen”).
When analyzing stocks I try to follow the advices of stock picking legends Peter Lynch and Benjamin Graham; the mentor of Warren Buffett.
Apart from reading the financial reports, Lynch contacted their competitors and customers and also tried to visit the premises.
There are two Wyndham companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) is the Timeshare company. They sell VOIs (Vacation Ownership Interests). I am one of their customers and paid 58,379 usd for a “silver membership” in the Wyndham Access club. Every year I get 400000 “points” and can use them to stay in a Wyndham facility. (Nashville “cost” 50000 points/week in off season while it usually cost 15000 points/night outside USA).
During 1,5 years I have expressed my extremely low customer satisfaction to the Better Business Bureau and on various chat sites and to several (senior) Wyndham Club officials. Meanwhile, I have honestly never come into contact with anyone who has been happy with the membership. This must be totally unique, and everybody has the same story to tell.
You sign up for the rest of your life and it is almost impossible to exit the membership and get the money back. Still, long time Wyndham Club members complain that very little of the promised vacation locations are available. A Wyndham whistleblower had to be paid 20 million dollars because she exposed the criminal, unethical sales technique of Wyndham.
Wyndham and their subsidiary RCI claim to have properties around the world for their club members. But they have not. Especially not during the season when most people take vacations.
Their booking system is rigged. The paying hotel guest comes first and the life time member have to accept what is then available. Myself I could not even get a week in Memphis in January 2018 (starting January 16th), despite that they have at least 16 hotels there. But they had one week in Nashville instead. And that hotel was almost full while other hotel chains nearby were almost empty and there were no lights in their windows. It was snowing and freezing cold in Nashville and Tennessee. The pavements were icy and dangerously slippery, and no concerts were advertised at the Grand Ole Opry. But we had to accept what was available. In this case it was not Hawaii, Brazil or Fiji Islands.
The club subsidiary RCI have more properties outside USA. RCI is said to be included in the membership; but it was not. It took me 3 months and three reminders before I became a member in RCI. And then my vacation time was over.
Whenever you use a Wyndham property you are invited to a update meeting. They promise interesting news for members. But it is all about upgrading your Club membership. And to pay them more.
They said that my Silver membership was not good enough for me. I needed the Rewards system and a Gold membership. And after an 8-9 hours meeting (without anything to eat meanwhile) I signed another contract and paid 46,779 usd.
Later I found out that I was already in the Rewards system. All I had to do was to transfer Wyndham Access points there. I had paid 46,779 dollars in vain. And no one bothered to tell me that when you transfer points this way, the exchange rate is only 0,4 Rewards points for 1 Club Access point.
When going to Sri Lanka in early December 2018 I found out that there was only 5 Wyndham places in that whole country. 4 were in the Capital and in the nearby area of the International airport. Plus one resort circa 250 kilometers away. But nothing was available for me.
And when calculating the cost of a Silver Club membership plus Club-maintenance costs I could only stay there for 11 days anyway. So I used a hotel booking site instead. They had 11000 places to offer in Sri Lanka. Comparing those costs with my silver membership, I could instead stay for 222 days in nice family hotels close to the beach.
I’m a member of Wyndham Club Access. The net is full of complains about how they run their business. Both by members, and by people who have been invited to their sales meetings. The complaints are not about small issues like unfriendly staff and unclean rooms (These are very frequent too of course….). But major issues that sales people promise things that goes against what’s in the contract. The sales people have positive answers to every question. Then they disappear leaving behind lots of unfulfilled promises. Their e-mail addresses cease to exist and phone calls are unanswered. I have never been able to get hold of a sales person after a contract was signed…
Wyndham is obviously over selling their memberships and taking in more members than they have accommodations for. They are promising overseas accommodations in faraway places where they have no footprint (They promised Africa for me, but have almost nothing there). And when they “help” with financing a membership they charge a 21 % interest rate.
Their back office is not working. It took them 30 minutes to set up an automatic payment plan for the rest of my life but 3 months to confirm that my message had been received and then another month to reply to just a few of my many questions.
Still it’s not the sales people who are responsible for this toxic sales and company culture. They just follow orders from the board and executive staff of WYND. (Who knows? Will we eventually see the CEO and boardmembers walk handcuffed the long way to the police-car following in the footsteps of Bernie Madoff, while angry club members try to hit them in the face?)
Because Wyndham Vacation Clubs are criminal organizations too. You can not sell and promise something and then not deliver. Even Charles Ponzi found that out as did the board and the executive persons at Enron and Worldcom. A class action is being prepared (Please contact Howard Prossnitz, prossnitzlaw@gmail.com). (Unfortunately, I can not join. The contract I signed had a clause that I could not have a jury trial. Wyndham outsmarted me).
*
My suggestion; Buy one share in Wyndham Destinations (WYND) listed on the New York Stock exchange. Go to their annual general meetings and tell everybody that you are unsatisfied. Picket once a week outside your local Wyndham hotel building. And make sure that reporters from your local radio, TV-station and newspaper are there too.
Attend the PTVO meetings. It is the “condo association” for Club members. This is what Robert Sachs of San Francisco CA. said when he wanted to join the PTVO board last year;
This is my first year of Club Wyndham ownership and I already have concerns. Reviewing the 2018 Budget I see a substantial increase in Bad Debt Expense over 2017: Points increased by only 11 % but Bad Debt increased 51 %. This suggests that Club Wyndham may have been too aggressive in its sales to unqualified buyers, taking on more risk than is prudent simply to grow the client base. The result is both a financial loss (bad debt) and increased difficulty by upstanding owners to use their points, since more owners are chasing the same number of properties. These are the types of issues on which the board should focus.”
I can only agree.
We have gotten a title insurance policy from First American Title Insurance Co. The “property” is listed as “Club Wyndham Access”. (But no info is given about usd-value or square meters or square feet or number of co-owners we share it with). Still PTVO says that all property is owned by a Trust. And that we don’t own anything.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) presents itself as a Timeshare Company and as a mother-company for the Wyndham Vacation Clubs. And WYND sell “vacation ownership interests” (VOIs)/(=“Points”) to individual consumers; provides consumer financing in connection with the sale of VOIs at 21 % (sic!) interest.
WYNDs financial position is very weak. The booked value is negative (- 6.30 usd/share), and the informed investors have discovered that this company is a house of cards, mortgaged above the chimney. If all assets are sold it will still be in debt. Total Debt is 5.46 billion dollars while the Market Cap is only 4.05 billion dollars (June 2019). They are technically bankrupt.
The stock price have plummeted during the last 18 months from 57.31 usd (January 2018) to 43.21 usd (June 2019) despite recommendation by stock market TV-guru Jim Cramer in June 2018,
It is alarming that WYND is in this position. Their business model is brilliant. Members in the Vacation Clubs have been convinced and persuaded to make a very large one time advance payment – or take loans with an interest rate of 21% - to enjoy expensive vacations for the rest of their lives. The members also pay yearly maintenance fees despite the fact that we, and “our” PTVO or “Condo association”, are not owners but that the ownership is in a “Trust”.
I thought that my membership money was used to build or buy property to make sure I always had some place to stay. But instead it seems like the one-time advance payment is divided between the sales force and the Wyndham staff. I stopped all my payments more than one year ago. I had to tell my American bank that I was the victim of a scam. Many others have stopped paying too. There will be a bankruptcy in the future, but remember, that money is lost anyway.
They target senior citizens and immigrants who don’t have English as their first language. I’m not an American citizen or live in USA. (I was promised many special offers (“perks”) but I have only received two that can be used in Sweden, where I live. By two car rental companies).
At the first sales meeting I was told – Wyndham sales force confirmed – that this was a way of giving people cheap access to otherwise empty hotel rooms. Which might sometimes be true in low seasons and unpopular locations. Like Nashville in January during a snow storm.
THE GUILTY PEOPLE
We have a saying here: If you want to sweep a staircase clean –always start at the top. Who are the people responsible for creating this mess and ruining the lives of senior citizens every day of the year?
Please direct all correspondence and complaints about Club Wyndham to these people.
(The WYND company):
The CEO, President and Director Mr. Michael D. Brown (born 1971).
The Executive Vice president and chief Financial officer Mr. Michael A. Hug (born 1968)
The Executive Vice president and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer Mr. James J. Savina (born 1974)
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer of Wyndham Vacation Clubs Mr. Jeff Myers (born 1968)
Chief Operating Officer of Wyndham Vacation Clubs Mr. Geoff Richards (born 1973)
The WYND BOARD MEMBERS;
Stephen P. Holmes, Chairman of the Board,
Under the heading LEADERSHIP we see;
Michael D. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer
Jeff Myers, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
Geoff Richards, Chief Operating Officer, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
Barry Robinson, President and Managing Director, International Operations, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
I also believe that the Board of Directors of the PTVO Owners Association are not really protecting our interests; Dave Evans (President), Pete Hernandez (Treasurer).
*
I get replies almost daily to my own writing from other unhappy members. The Wyndham Club strategy might be more sinister and negative than we have imagined. We have broken all contact with Wyndham. We don’t pay them and we don’t stay at Wyndham locations. And eventually Wyndham decides that we have defaulted and they will keep the membership money. This is a financial Jack Pot for Wyndham. It is a lot of money to take and keep; and it is probably part of their evil plan.
The bad behavior of Wyndham is well known in USA. 900000 Club members also have families. Maybe 1 % of the population in America have been hurt and they are telling the other 99 % about it. So now they have to target people not living in USA or immigrants who don’t speak English well.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) has a negative booked value. If they sell all assets they will still be in debt. WYND is doomed. Eventually it will collapse.
Who wants to employ a former Wyndham official or a former Wyndham board member when the word Wyndham will be as bad as Madoff?
The following people are analysts for the WYND stock. They are the ones that analyze a public company from various aspects; Profit, future earnings, dividends, performances by the CEO and board, etc.
They decide whether the stock is on the way up because it’s well run and profitable. Or if you should sell the stock as it has weaknesses and is on the way down.
A good analyst is interviewing customers and competitors. I think that they have forgotten that we are the customers. We have a life long relationship with WYND. And our children might even inherit the membership. We have bought the VOIs and WYND operates the Vacation Clubs.
I think that Benjamin Graham avoided to invest in a company with a negative booked value. I have contacted the WYND Analysts. I have a feeling that they are unaware of the discontent among the WYND customers (and that they have overlooked the negative booked value).
No one has answered so far. I suggest that you also contact them. WYND is listed on the New York Stock exchange. A listed company like WYND cannot behave like they do. The stockholders will eventually understand that a collapse is forthcoming. Then they will sell the shares. An analyst who is not aware of what we – the customers - think and feel and give a “buy” recommendation will lose their credibility among investors. They will be happy that we have contacted them and warned them.
I guess that WYND is telling them as many lies as they have told us. Remember, WYND is a corrupt company. It should be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because of criminal conduct.
Please contact these analysts;
ben.combes@credit-suisse.com
stephen.grambling@gs.com
tbatory@janney.com
dkatz@jefferies.com
joseph.greff@jpmorgan.com
brandt.a.montour@jpmorgan.com
brian.dobson@instinet.com
ian.zaffino@opco.com
yarmaks@stifel.com
patrick.scholes@suntrust.com
jshojaian@wolferesearch.com
*
Club members say that they cannot get the vacations they have been promised. In fact some have first been refused as club Members and been told that it is not available – and then they booked the same vacation at the same time as a paying customer. Because when you pay you go first. This is completely opposite what we have been promised. It is fraudulent, and it has to be stopped.
Jonas Bernholm, Blekingegatan 25, 11856 Stockholm, Sweden Ph: 0046-8-6426358.
(The full story about my Wyndham Failure is available. Please write to jonasbernholm@yahoo.com)
[This post has been split off into its own thread]
I used to be a reporter for 10 years (2005-2015) at the largest stock market magazine in Scandinavia ( called “Aktiespararen”).
When analyzing stocks I try to follow the advices of stock picking legends Peter Lynch and Benjamin Graham; the mentor of Warren Buffett.
Apart from reading the financial reports, Lynch contacted their competitors and customers and also tried to visit the premises.
There are two Wyndham companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) is the Timeshare company. They sell VOIs (Vacation Ownership Interests). I am one of their customers and paid 58,379 usd for a “silver membership” in the Wyndham Access club. Every year I get 400000 “points” and can use them to stay in a Wyndham facility. (Nashville “cost” 50000 points/week in off season while it usually cost 15000 points/night outside USA).
During 1,5 years I have expressed my extremely low customer satisfaction to the Better Business Bureau and on various chat sites and to several (senior) Wyndham Club officials. Meanwhile, I have honestly never come into contact with anyone who has been happy with the membership. This must be totally unique, and everybody has the same story to tell.
You sign up for the rest of your life and it is almost impossible to exit the membership and get the money back. Still, long time Wyndham Club members complain that very little of the promised vacation locations are available. A Wyndham whistleblower had to be paid 20 million dollars because she exposed the criminal, unethical sales technique of Wyndham.
Wyndham and their subsidiary RCI claim to have properties around the world for their club members. But they have not. Especially not during the season when most people take vacations.
Their booking system is rigged. The paying hotel guest comes first and the life time member have to accept what is then available. Myself I could not even get a week in Memphis in January 2018 (starting January 16th), despite that they have at least 16 hotels there. But they had one week in Nashville instead. And that hotel was almost full while other hotel chains nearby were almost empty and there were no lights in their windows. It was snowing and freezing cold in Nashville and Tennessee. The pavements were icy and dangerously slippery, and no concerts were advertised at the Grand Ole Opry. But we had to accept what was available. In this case it was not Hawaii, Brazil or Fiji Islands.
The club subsidiary RCI have more properties outside USA. RCI is said to be included in the membership; but it was not. It took me 3 months and three reminders before I became a member in RCI. And then my vacation time was over.
Whenever you use a Wyndham property you are invited to a update meeting. They promise interesting news for members. But it is all about upgrading your Club membership. And to pay them more.
They said that my Silver membership was not good enough for me. I needed the Rewards system and a Gold membership. And after an 8-9 hours meeting (without anything to eat meanwhile) I signed another contract and paid 46,779 usd.
Later I found out that I was already in the Rewards system. All I had to do was to transfer Wyndham Access points there. I had paid 46,779 dollars in vain. And no one bothered to tell me that when you transfer points this way, the exchange rate is only 0,4 Rewards points for 1 Club Access point.
When going to Sri Lanka in early December 2018 I found out that there was only 5 Wyndham places in that whole country. 4 were in the Capital and in the nearby area of the International airport. Plus one resort circa 250 kilometers away. But nothing was available for me.
And when calculating the cost of a Silver Club membership plus Club-maintenance costs I could only stay there for 11 days anyway. So I used a hotel booking site instead. They had 11000 places to offer in Sri Lanka. Comparing those costs with my silver membership, I could instead stay for 222 days in nice family hotels close to the beach.
I’m a member of Wyndham Club Access. The net is full of complains about how they run their business. Both by members, and by people who have been invited to their sales meetings. The complaints are not about small issues like unfriendly staff and unclean rooms (These are very frequent too of course….). But major issues that sales people promise things that goes against what’s in the contract. The sales people have positive answers to every question. Then they disappear leaving behind lots of unfulfilled promises. Their e-mail addresses cease to exist and phone calls are unanswered. I have never been able to get hold of a sales person after a contract was signed…
Wyndham is obviously over selling their memberships and taking in more members than they have accommodations for. They are promising overseas accommodations in faraway places where they have no footprint (They promised Africa for me, but have almost nothing there). And when they “help” with financing a membership they charge a 21 % interest rate.
Their back office is not working. It took them 30 minutes to set up an automatic payment plan for the rest of my life but 3 months to confirm that my message had been received and then another month to reply to just a few of my many questions.
Still it’s not the sales people who are responsible for this toxic sales and company culture. They just follow orders from the board and executive staff of WYND. (Who knows? Will we eventually see the CEO and boardmembers walk handcuffed the long way to the police-car following in the footsteps of Bernie Madoff, while angry club members try to hit them in the face?)
Because Wyndham Vacation Clubs are criminal organizations too. You can not sell and promise something and then not deliver. Even Charles Ponzi found that out as did the board and the executive persons at Enron and Worldcom. A class action is being prepared (Please contact Howard Prossnitz, prossnitzlaw@gmail.com). (Unfortunately, I can not join. The contract I signed had a clause that I could not have a jury trial. Wyndham outsmarted me).
*
My suggestion; Buy one share in Wyndham Destinations (WYND) listed on the New York Stock exchange. Go to their annual general meetings and tell everybody that you are unsatisfied. Picket once a week outside your local Wyndham hotel building. And make sure that reporters from your local radio, TV-station and newspaper are there too.
Attend the PTVO meetings. It is the “condo association” for Club members. This is what Robert Sachs of San Francisco CA. said when he wanted to join the PTVO board last year;
This is my first year of Club Wyndham ownership and I already have concerns. Reviewing the 2018 Budget I see a substantial increase in Bad Debt Expense over 2017: Points increased by only 11 % but Bad Debt increased 51 %. This suggests that Club Wyndham may have been too aggressive in its sales to unqualified buyers, taking on more risk than is prudent simply to grow the client base. The result is both a financial loss (bad debt) and increased difficulty by upstanding owners to use their points, since more owners are chasing the same number of properties. These are the types of issues on which the board should focus.”
I can only agree.
We have gotten a title insurance policy from First American Title Insurance Co. The “property” is listed as “Club Wyndham Access”. (But no info is given about usd-value or square meters or square feet or number of co-owners we share it with). Still PTVO says that all property is owned by a Trust. And that we don’t own anything.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) presents itself as a Timeshare Company and as a mother-company for the Wyndham Vacation Clubs. And WYND sell “vacation ownership interests” (VOIs)/(=“Points”) to individual consumers; provides consumer financing in connection with the sale of VOIs at 21 % (sic!) interest.
WYNDs financial position is very weak. The booked value is negative (- 6.30 usd/share), and the informed investors have discovered that this company is a house of cards, mortgaged above the chimney. If all assets are sold it will still be in debt. Total Debt is 5.46 billion dollars while the Market Cap is only 4.05 billion dollars (June 2019). They are technically bankrupt.
The stock price have plummeted during the last 18 months from 57.31 usd (January 2018) to 43.21 usd (June 2019) despite recommendation by stock market TV-guru Jim Cramer in June 2018,
It is alarming that WYND is in this position. Their business model is brilliant. Members in the Vacation Clubs have been convinced and persuaded to make a very large one time advance payment – or take loans with an interest rate of 21% - to enjoy expensive vacations for the rest of their lives. The members also pay yearly maintenance fees despite the fact that we, and “our” PTVO or “Condo association”, are not owners but that the ownership is in a “Trust”.
I thought that my membership money was used to build or buy property to make sure I always had some place to stay. But instead it seems like the one-time advance payment is divided between the sales force and the Wyndham staff. I stopped all my payments more than one year ago. I had to tell my American bank that I was the victim of a scam. Many others have stopped paying too. There will be a bankruptcy in the future, but remember, that money is lost anyway.
They target senior citizens and immigrants who don’t have English as their first language. I’m not an American citizen or live in USA. (I was promised many special offers (“perks”) but I have only received two that can be used in Sweden, where I live. By two car rental companies).
At the first sales meeting I was told – Wyndham sales force confirmed – that this was a way of giving people cheap access to otherwise empty hotel rooms. Which might sometimes be true in low seasons and unpopular locations. Like Nashville in January during a snow storm.
THE GUILTY PEOPLE
We have a saying here: If you want to sweep a staircase clean –always start at the top. Who are the people responsible for creating this mess and ruining the lives of senior citizens every day of the year?
Please direct all correspondence and complaints about Club Wyndham to these people.
(The WYND company):
The CEO, President and Director Mr. Michael D. Brown (born 1971).
The Executive Vice president and chief Financial officer Mr. Michael A. Hug (born 1968)
The Executive Vice president and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer Mr. James J. Savina (born 1974)
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer of Wyndham Vacation Clubs Mr. Jeff Myers (born 1968)
Chief Operating Officer of Wyndham Vacation Clubs Mr. Geoff Richards (born 1973)
The WYND BOARD MEMBERS;
Stephen P. Holmes, Chairman of the Board,
Under the heading LEADERSHIP we see;
Michael D. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer
Jeff Myers, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
Geoff Richards, Chief Operating Officer, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
Barry Robinson, President and Managing Director, International Operations, Wyndham Vacation Clubs
I also believe that the Board of Directors of the PTVO Owners Association are not really protecting our interests; Dave Evans (President), Pete Hernandez (Treasurer).
*
I get replies almost daily to my own writing from other unhappy members. The Wyndham Club strategy might be more sinister and negative than we have imagined. We have broken all contact with Wyndham. We don’t pay them and we don’t stay at Wyndham locations. And eventually Wyndham decides that we have defaulted and they will keep the membership money. This is a financial Jack Pot for Wyndham. It is a lot of money to take and keep; and it is probably part of their evil plan.
The bad behavior of Wyndham is well known in USA. 900000 Club members also have families. Maybe 1 % of the population in America have been hurt and they are telling the other 99 % about it. So now they have to target people not living in USA or immigrants who don’t speak English well.
WYND (Wyndham Destinations) has a negative booked value. If they sell all assets they will still be in debt. WYND is doomed. Eventually it will collapse.
Who wants to employ a former Wyndham official or a former Wyndham board member when the word Wyndham will be as bad as Madoff?
The following people are analysts for the WYND stock. They are the ones that analyze a public company from various aspects; Profit, future earnings, dividends, performances by the CEO and board, etc.
They decide whether the stock is on the way up because it’s well run and profitable. Or if you should sell the stock as it has weaknesses and is on the way down.
A good analyst is interviewing customers and competitors. I think that they have forgotten that we are the customers. We have a life long relationship with WYND. And our children might even inherit the membership. We have bought the VOIs and WYND operates the Vacation Clubs.
I think that Benjamin Graham avoided to invest in a company with a negative booked value. I have contacted the WYND Analysts. I have a feeling that they are unaware of the discontent among the WYND customers (and that they have overlooked the negative booked value).
No one has answered so far. I suggest that you also contact them. WYND is listed on the New York Stock exchange. A listed company like WYND cannot behave like they do. The stockholders will eventually understand that a collapse is forthcoming. Then they will sell the shares. An analyst who is not aware of what we – the customers - think and feel and give a “buy” recommendation will lose their credibility among investors. They will be happy that we have contacted them and warned them.
I guess that WYND is telling them as many lies as they have told us. Remember, WYND is a corrupt company. It should be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because of criminal conduct.
Please contact these analysts;
ben.combes@credit-suisse.com
stephen.grambling@gs.com
tbatory@janney.com
dkatz@jefferies.com
joseph.greff@jpmorgan.com
brandt.a.montour@jpmorgan.com
brian.dobson@instinet.com
ian.zaffino@opco.com
yarmaks@stifel.com
patrick.scholes@suntrust.com
jshojaian@wolferesearch.com
*
Club members say that they cannot get the vacations they have been promised. In fact some have first been refused as club Members and been told that it is not available – and then they booked the same vacation at the same time as a paying customer. Because when you pay you go first. This is completely opposite what we have been promised. It is fraudulent, and it has to be stopped.
Jonas Bernholm, Blekingegatan 25, 11856 Stockholm, Sweden Ph: 0046-8-6426358.
(The full story about my Wyndham Failure is available. Please write to jonasbernholm@yahoo.com)
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