Asia Rewards Holidays

[minniemax]

Can anyone help me? I have seen adverts for the above company offering one week's accomodation in top asian hotels for �49 - the only catch I can see is that you have to sit through a morning or afternoon of sales pitches but 'with no obligaton'. Has anyone been on one of the holidays with no ill effects fm no purchasing anthing other than the orginal �49 accomodation and having a great holiday? TIA

[Buenchico]

From various reports I've read, most of these companies do, eventually, 'come up with the goods'. However there are usually 'terms and conditions', which make what you get far less attractive than it first seems.

Many cheap accommodation offers include a condition that you must pay for your meals in the hotel, whether you actually take them or not. If breakfast is �25 per day and dinner is �60 per day, you might find that the 'cheap' hotels aren't so cheap after all!

Chris

[minniemax]

Thanks Chris

[buildersmate]

The thing about hotels is that they have fixed costs of running them (the buildings and the staff, mainly). So you need to appreciate that they are using the fact they are sure they have spare capacity (global recession and all that) to sell that spare capacity cheap.
The sale pitch will be some timeshare-centred thing, which obviously you just need to keep saying the magic words 'no, no, no' to.

[gazzawazza]

We went to one of these presentations about 10 years ago and they way they presented it had us almost signing up to buy a timeshare.
We asked for a few minutes to think, and then we managed to work out that we weren't getting any where near as good a deal as we'd thought we were.
We told them we were not going to be buying and asked if we were actually going to be offered the luxury holiday we had been promised for attending.
"Oh yes, of course, someone will be along to sort that out if you just go into the conservatory area."
We waited and waited, and were just about to go when a lady came and explained that we only had to pay a basic fee of about �200. The catch was, we had to be able to go whenever they called us. In other words, they would call us without warning on any date within the next six months and offer us a holiday leaving the next day, or even just a few hours later on that same day!
Obviously not many working people are in a position to do that so they had very few takers, unsurprisingly!
I would imagine there will be some sort of catch along these lines.
If you do go along, be warned, they are very good at what they do, making it sound unbelievably good value and persuading to buy. We actually felt very pleased with ourselves afterwards just because we had resisted the temptation!

[Dee Sa]

the catch with what was offered to gazzawzza for �200 is that you cannot get a visa overnight. Also not all rooms have a/c or even fans in the room and the shower etc will probably leave a lot to be desired.
Who in their right mind would pay �25 for breakfast and �60 for dinner in India,even the Taj group dont charge that much !
this scheme is just short of a scam.In a decent restaurant in Goa four people can have a meal plus drinks for �20.