ORLANDO, Florida — A small group of protesters gathered Thursday in front of Westgate Lakes Resort & Spa in Orlando to spotlight what they claim are unethical sales practices by the Westgate timeshare company.
The demonstration coincided with the company’s annual owners’ meeting.
“I don’t like to speak up about anything,” said Lori Kelso, who flew in from her home in Indiana to attend. “What they did was so wrong, I just had to do something.”
Around noon, the mini-protest fluctuated between five and three people. They got wet from rain and sprinklers going in front of the resort as they waved signs saying, “Westgate Buyer Beware,” and “Don’t buy. They lie. Ask me why.”
Kelso, who works as an assistant to a real estate company, is the creator of Westgate Timeshare Hostages, a Facebook group with more than 1,600 members. The page is full of stories about people who say they were misled by high-pressure sales tactics.
Asked about the protests, Mark Waltrip, Westgate’s chief operating officer, referenced a shooting at Orlando Westgate locations in December. The 19-year-old suspect in the shooting, which wounded two people, said he felt “scammed” when a Westgate hotel wouldn’t let him check in for being under 21 (a company policy), and told detectives he felt “a sense of relief” after the shooting.
“Unfortunately, an isolated group of individuals are leveraging the shooter’s actions to harass the resort with comments on social media wishing that our CEO had been shot, as well as staging a protest at our resort owners’ meeting,” Waltrip wrote in an email.
Kelso, however, produced a Facebook event page showing the protest had been scheduled days before the shooting.
On Westgate Timeshare Hostages, one post at the time of the shooting included a comment from a user asking if CEO David Siegel was shot, followed by another comment that had been deleted.
Kelso, 51, says she bought a unit in 2010 and a second one in 2012. She says she tried to sell them after paying off their mortgages, but the company denied her, and she had been unaware of a hidden contract document that allowed them to deny sales without giving a reason.
Kelso’s complaint has similar elements to a lawsuit the company lost in 2015 in Tennessee.
In court and other public statements, Westgate has denied allegations that it intentionally hid the document, though it did admit in the Tennessee case that it had failed to provide an updated version of it.
Kelso said the goal of the protest was “to prevent consumers from falling for the sales pitch [and] to wake up the regulating agencies that seem to be turning a blind eye.”
She said the Florida attorney general has received more than 500 complaints about the company. A spokeswoman Ashley Moody’s office was unable to confirm that number in time for publication.
