Send to a Friend

LadyBabu's avatar

Free cruise scam?

Asked by LadyBabu (4points) September 30th, 2010

My boyfriend and I went to the Oktoberfest in Cincinnati and entered one of the “Enter to win a BMW suv” things, you know, like you put a piece of paper with your info on to a box and they will draw a winner…Anyways, we pretty much forgot about it then he got a call a few days ago that we have won a 4 day cruise to the Caribeans includes the airfares, and all the accommondations (Mexico or Bahamas of our choice). So we were very excited. But we were very cautious too so he asked them over and over again if we have any obligations or do we have to pay taxes and things like that. They said no, all we need to do was to go to a presentation yesterday.
So we went there, it’s a company called smart travel or TAN, with the expectation that they wanted to sell us something. And yes, they wanted to sell us a vacation package (“Wholesale” vacations, where you pay 15,000 for 30 vacations). We pretty much had our minds set that we are just going to sit through the time and took our cruise trip and go.
So it was the presentation and then a one on one session with a sales person. It was hard core high pressure sales there but we still were not persuaded at all. Then at the end, he figured that we would not be buying their things, so he said, well, have fun with the cruises but you have to pay port fees and taxes.
We were both very surprised that we still have to pay for some of the things but they said it’s only about $250 max per person so we thought that’s not too bad, we can pay for that..
But this whole thing, especially how they talk and how their organization is organized made us suspicious, we both feel like the cruise trip might not be simple like that, we feel like it might be a scam but not sure how?
Has anyone here knows or has experienced similar situations?

Using Fluther

or

Using Email

Separate multiple emails with commas.
We’ll only use these emails for this message.