We are in Santa Fe. Five days before we left home for the Sedona leg of our trip, Cliff’s sister called to say they were flying from Dallas to San Jose to buy a second hand Mercedes sports car. Although at one point my brother-in-law indicated he would never set foot in the sinful state of California, they were proposing a drive down to Los Angeles to see us. We said we wouldn’t be home, but they have to drive by Albuquerque anyway to get home, come see us in Santa Fe. And let us see if we can get you a room for two nights at our Diamond timeshare. That worked out just fine.
....
These folks have been given accommodations in Branson (without us), and a previous Santa Fe trip as part of a larger family gathering where we were just happy to arrange to get people together and did not expect anything in return. But Jimminy Christmas, this is the LAST time we are offering free lodging to them! We have never once had friends not buy a meal and/or chip in or buy groceries or gas. Shaking our heads and sighing.
I agree with you completely, on your BIL & SIL's lack of reciprocity. Unfortunately with some people you have to be very specific when it comes to costs, otherwise it falls into that deep gulf of "Oh I just assumed you would...".
So odd that your BIL asked about your yearly maintenance fee costs, so he knows it costs you to get them lodging. After awhile, you can't attribute poor guest manners to cluelessness!
Some of my friends who do not own timeshares, don't understand there's a yearly MF cost to them. And even when I've explained it to them, I still get the unspoken feeling that I should be treating them or pick up a lot more of the overall costs for groceries and cooking etc. I've always been up front when I invite my friends to travel with us, e.g. to Hawaii, on what their share for lodging will be if they choose to come. We pretty much split costs and chores on our first trip with a friend couple. But on the 2nd trip with same couple, DH & I picked up a lot more than our fair share of costs, cooking and cleaning. My friend helped after the first couple of days, her husband did very little, not even clean-up after meals.
I bought and cut a pineapple when we first got to our Hawaii unit. We all enjoyed it a lot. My friend's husband bought another pineapple and told me about it. I offered to show him how to cut it. He replied he remembered from our last Hawaii trip
. The pineapple sat on the kitchen counter until the day before we had to check-out. I'm pretty sure the husband assumed I would cut it up or him, and this may sound petty, but I wasn't going to cut up his pineapple
as I ended up planning and cooking most of the meals in unit. So on our last full day, I asked them both what they were going to do with the pineapple. They looked at each other, and my friend, by default, semi-brute force cut it up.
