One of the sad truths about the modern travel industry is that timeshares and vacation clubs continue to prey on travelers. Hundreds of thousands of timeshare products are purchased every year by travelers who were lured into slick sales presentations at timeshare resorts — only to find out that they purchased an ongoing financial burden of timeshare maintenance fees, exchange fees, repairs, and other costs.

To add insult to injury, these owners find that there is no real timeshare resale market, so they can’t make money back. Timeshare developers also prevent them from defraying their costs by blocking rentals or charging large upfront fees for allowing those rentals.

This ongoing problem has led to the formation of the timeshare exit industry. These companies were formed to help people get out of their timeshare contracts. The great need has led to the creation of many Timeshare Exit companies. If you are an unhappy timeshare owner, you have a lot of choices.

Beware, though. Not all timeshare companies are created equal. While some are better than others, there are a few that have created even more legal and financial problems for the people that they were supposed to be helping. With that in mind and the number of options when it comes to timeshare exit companies, you may not know where to start.

This article will discuss many of the timeshare exit companies from the past few years. We’ll look at the costs of using their timeshare exit services as well as customer testimonials and the reputations the companies have established. Most importantly, we’ll look at the timeshare exit scams you should avoid at all costs.

Timeshare Compliance
Timeshare exit companies: old employee with stacks of documents on his desk
Timeshare Compliance has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) since 2016. They have established a good reputation for achieving timeshare exits in some cases, though they have had 21 complaints in the past three years. In others, though, their communication has fallen short and caused some trouble for their customers, which the company then had to fix after receiving negative reviews.

Many timeshare exit companies have a money-back guarantee. Timeshare Compliance offers an escrow option whereby a fee can be held by a third party until the company does its job. There are reports, though, that almost none of Timeshare Compliance’s customers qualify for this option, which is offered more as a marketing ploy than a genuine option.

The services offered by Timeshare Compliance, as currently described on their website, are vague. The site focuses on legal solutions and referring cases to lawyers. Though timeshare attorneys can help resolve a case, their services can be quite expensive and are not always necessary.

As a result, fees from Timeshare Compliance can add up quickly. Their fees begin at $4,500, though they can get up into the tens of thousands of dollars. There is at least one report that the final fees from this company went as high as $100,000.

There have also been complaints about communication and tactics advised by the company after fees were paid. This includes three lawsuits from timeshare companies who allege that Timeshare Compliance told clients to simply stop making payments to the companies. This is not an exit solution nor a service that anyone should pay for. Apart from not solving a client’s problem, this can also cause foreclosure, deficiency judgments, and ruin credit scores. 

Wesley Financial Group
Building in Franklin, Tennessee
Wesley Financial Group, LLC, is a non-BBB-accredited timeshare cancellation company based in Franklin, Tennessee. The company’s website promises termination of timeshare agreements using their in-house team but is very light on details as to the company’s timeshare exit process. This appears to consist of a combination of legal representation and advocacy directly to the developer on an owner’s behalf.

Complaints (of which there have been 61 in the last three years) about Wesley Financial Group center on sporadic or infrequent communication (contrary to what was promised) and the number of fees paid. The amount of fees reported is between $4,000 and $10,000. Some owners, however, have reported fees that would be almost as much as what they would just pay their developer to get out of their contract.

At least one customer complained on Yelp that he had been paying Wesley Financial Group for nearly a year, then sought to cancel the engagement because he was unhappy with the services. When he sought to collect on the company’s money-back guarantee (which is used instead of an escrow option), they denied it was an issue covered by the guarantee and refused a refund.

Vacation Consulting Services
Whereas Timeshare Compliance and Wesley Financial Group have mixed reviews, Vacation Consulting Services has a dismal F rating on the BBB website. This company is notable for its promise that if it was unable to achieve a timeshare exit within one year, it would buy its clients’ interests from them.

If that promise sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was just another of the many scams that have arisen in this area. In 2020, the Missouri Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Vacation Consulting Services for its failure to provide this relief to its clients. 

The company also allegedly advised some of its clients to default on their timeshare payments, leading to foreclosures and other legal problems for those clients. Reckless advice like this can also ruin a timeshare owner’s credit score.

For all these reasons, Vacation Consulting Services is among the timeshare exit companies that should not be recommended to anybody.