I went to one of the Wyndham presentations a couple years back, partially for the free (albeit shitty) breakfast, free tickets to a local attraction (actually somewhat valuable) and to observe the sales pitch. I came away similarly impressed.
They used a lot of tactics like personal vacation stories, highly suspect financial calculations and so forth. But the one I was most impressed by was getting people in the habit of saying "yes!" a lot. They'd ask a bunch of really dumb stuff like "Do you like to go on vacation?!", "Do you like to have FUN?!", "Do you like to SAVE MONEY?!" etc to get people all hyped up. Then they'd ask them if they want a timeshare, and people are primed to say yes. There's some actual psychological studies on that effect. It worked really well.
They also had our credit card info already because we were staying in another Wyndham property, and kept saying that we'd have to sign some form or else they'd charge our card for the tickets. Of course they made it difficult to get that form. You can get it after we tour one of the model units. You can get it after we look at another one. You can have it after we watch this video. Sure, you can have it now, but first let's look at this financial worksheet. Always being super nice to make it hard to be assertive with them. I finally had to basically curse at the sweet young lady to get the form out of them, but they managed to tack on 45 minutes of high pressure sales time over and above the minimum we had to spend.
It's all quite impressive in a "dark patterns" sort of way.
There was a bunch of crap to sign. I suspect there was some agreement, otherwise people would just not show up to the presentation at all. But TBH I didn't read it all or seriously consider doing a chargeback.
They used a lot of tactics like personal vacation stories, highly suspect financial calculations and so forth. But the one I was most impressed by was getting people in the habit of saying "yes!" a lot. They'd ask a bunch of really dumb stuff like "Do you like to go on vacation?!", "Do you like to have FUN?!", "Do you like to SAVE MONEY?!" etc to get people all hyped up. Then they'd ask them if they want a timeshare, and people are primed to say yes. There's some actual psychological studies on that effect. It worked really well.
They also had our credit card info already because we were staying in another Wyndham property, and kept saying that we'd have to sign some form or else they'd charge our card for the tickets. Of course they made it difficult to get that form. You can get it after we tour one of the model units. You can get it after we look at another one. You can have it after we watch this video. Sure, you can have it now, but first let's look at this financial worksheet. Always being super nice to make it hard to be assertive with them. I finally had to basically curse at the sweet young lady to get the form out of them, but they managed to tack on 45 minutes of high pressure sales time over and above the minimum we had to spend.
It's all quite impressive in a "dark patterns" sort of way.