RV Membership Sales Pitch

We’re all settled in on the Quartzsite BLM. We have just about everything we need for the next few days. Our original arrival date was supposed to be Monday but we arrived Tuesday instead. Every day we seem to put something on our agenda. We’ve gotten pretty good at erasing plans though and adding in new ones.

On Wednesday we had an appointment with the sales office of a membership park north of Parker. We wanted to keep this appointment since several nice gifts were dangled. In order to get those gifts and take them home with us we had to listen to a 90 minute sales presentation at Havasu Springs. It sounded like a good deal. Besides we used to do this all the time when many more parks were offering gifts from TV sets to sleeping bags and even cash to visit them.

An RV park within one hour from the U.S.

We have been to several of these parks and have liked the ones we’ve stayed at. Most of them have everything one could ask for and the locations are good. We actually almost bought one of their memberships a while back. We do like their parks. However, with two memberships already including Thousand Trails, the RPI and ROD systems plus Elks, we felt we had plenty. We just can’t imagine being on the road as much as we are without a park membership of some kind. We save a ton of money using our memberships and feel some folks just don’t get it but that’s a personal opinion and it just doesn't work for everyone. However, we really weren’t interested in another membership. We went just for the free gifts and when asked we were honest with them. Dangle the gifts and if they’re good enough, we’ll be there. The problem is it’s much easier to embellish some gifts than others. A sleeping bag is a sleeping bag just like cash is cash. We just didn’t think to ask the right questions about the gifts.

What were we offered? First of all we were invited to stay free for 4 days / 3 nights around the same time as our sales presentation. We opted out of this since we were already set up in Quartzsite. Had they offered this in Yuma, we probably would have jumped at it. That option was not available. We know because we tried to get in to the Yuma park. The park at Havasu Springs has very limited internet service and our cell phone didn’t get a signal. We had already figured out it might be difficult to get reception there.

Secondly, we were offered $100 in a gas rebate certificate. This is how that works. It’s actually a reimbursement once you’ve spent over $100 at a Shell station. Only $25 in fuel is allowed for credit within a 30 day interval so it takes about 4 months to play the game. After four stops and four receipts, the receipts need to be attached to the original certificate and mailed back to the park to await their $100 refund check -- timeframe unknown.

We were also given a one year trial membership. What is this really? Well, according to the restrictions on the certificate, it’s for 20 nights -- 4 separate stays with a maximum of 5 days at a time and at least 60 days apart. You can’t stay on weekends or holidays and it can’t be used during peak season. Since peak season is January to September, it’s really not possible to get in 4 stays in the last four months of the year with these restrictions. About the most you can get is two stays of 5 days each or 10 total nights instead of the 20 listed.

And, last but not least, the real item we were interested in was the FREE netbook. Did we get it? You bet we did. The netbook wasn’t quite what we thought either. They did say netbook but I actually heard notebook. I heard what I wanted to hear and not what they said.

This netbook has a WinCE operating system with 128 MB of Ram and a 2 GB hard drive! Evidently these are intended for use just like the name … netbook for internet usage. With the internal memory, I would guess that some of what is on the internet would not be viewable on this netbook. Maybe I'll try it out. Maybe I won't. I guess I was expecting a notebook with all the bells and whistles. I should have asked. Silly me.

Just like I said, all the parks do this. I'm sure Thousand Trails does too. It's a way to get folks in. It was a good day and I’m glad we went. I’m not sure if we’ll use any of the gifts. We just need to think about it. We like the parks and we sure hope folks purchase their memberships so that we can continue to use them under our RPI membership.

It was cloudy, cool, rainy and windy. We’re hoping the weather improves.

Rain, rain go away

Tomorrow we hope to check out everything new and old in Quartzsite. It's hard to believe that we've been here several days so far and haven't even been to the vendors. There are a lot of them here and that's next on our list.

P.S. Southwest hasn’t found my suitcase. It’s still in space … someplace.