Beware Of Encore Park Reservations Options

[kthorn]

Recently had a bad vacation experience. Reserved 12 days at Encore's Pioneer Village in Fort Myers in early Jan. for Feb.12-24. We also prepaid. This was all done by phone through Encore central reservations. We drove 1400 miles from Toronto. When we arrived we were told that they had overbooked and had no sites. They claimed that Encore just keeps taking reservations and has no idea when park is full. This is hard to believe. They also offered no compensation because as they put it "you do have your RV to sleep in." I'm sure that everyone knows how difficult it is to find a place in Florida in Feb. After calling over 20 parks we found a spot in Lakeland, but we spent 5 days of our vacation moving from day to day until we found it.
We have stayed in Encore parks before with no problems, but when you have a problem you really find out a lot about an organization. In this case Encore and Pioneer rate a big fat 0.

[bambilynn]

We are Thousand Trails Platinum owners and are very discouraged by Encore's business practices. Without any official pre-notification to their Platinum members, an affilitation with ROD was dissolved eliminating a key component of our contract: Free camping in over 100 ROD membership parks. The only reason I found out about it was through the TTN Facebook site.

What does Encore have to say about this? The official word on their website and through member services is that they will give us an upgrade to RPI. We are already a member of RPI Preferred so they offered us a 6 month extension on our dues (valued at approximately $75). Big deal, we paid $4000 for the Platinum upgrade. Our contract says that if an affilitation is broken, they will replace it with something "comparable or better." I've written an e-mail and received no response. I spoke to a TTN branch manager who said this is a "legal issue" at "corporate" which is a "1.5 billion dollar company" and they don't communicate what is going on to the branches. He just passed buck to his boss but said I will have to jump through "many gatekeepers" before I could reach somebody who could address this concern.

What does ROD have to say about this? The "official word" is that it was a "mutual agreement." However, unofficially, ROD park managers have given us reasons why ROD no longer wants to support this affiliation. They are:
1.) TTN did not include ALL of their parks into the reciprocal agreement.
2.) TTN is now offering "zone passes" which allows non-members to access the TTN parks and violates ROD's by-laws.

It sounds like Encore has disregarded their contractual agreements to TTN Platinum members. Follow "TTN dropping ROD" on Facebook for more information on this subject.