Krystal Cancun

My friend and I had a wonderful stay at Krystal Cancun. From the beautiful location to the warm and welcoming atmosphere, we really enjoyed our time at the hotel.

A special thank you to Daniel and Carlos, who provided exceptional hospitality throughout our stay. They were incredibly friendly, attentive, and genuinely caring, always making sure we were comfortable and had everything we needed.

Daniel in particular made our stay very special. His kindness, positive energy, and thoughtful service truly stood out and made us feel welcomed and appreciated.

It’s people like Daniel and Carlos who can truly make a vacation memorable. We are very grateful for their hospitality and would definitely recommend Krystal Cancun. We would love to come back!

Krystal International Vacation Club  - Nearly the biggest mistake of our lives.

TL:DR - Krystal Vacation Club is about 95% Fraudulent, will lie and say anything to get your money, and won't give it back even if you cancel in the legal period. Run far, far away.  _____________________________________________

This review is for the TimeShare Presentation and subsequent nightmare we endured at Krystal Vacation Club in Cancun. If you are expecting something about the resort, quit reading and scroll down to the thousand other reviews about that. We did not stay at the resort other than getting a brief tour, but were plucked out of the airport like easy game by a man pretending to represent the agency we booked a ride through. We've been to Mexico before and had experienced this, but figured we'd play along and see what they had to offer...obviously that was mistake number one.  Everyone at these early interactions promises they are not a timeshare - that's lie number one. I don't care what you call it, but if you are asking for tens of thousands of dollars up front with the promise of some kind of vacation club, you are pushing a timeshare. They offered a free breakfast the next day, a private ride to Playa Del Carmen (which we needed to get to Cozumel), and a snorkeling trip. Ok....fair enough. It didn't help that we began this journey looking to get out of our previous timeshare (Hilton), and that apparently made us even easier targets. 

They put us with a man named "Grayson", and he was a pro. We were used to timeshare sales people being friendly and engaging, but the kicker was that he knew everything about our Hilton Vacations program. We were relatively new to Hilton Grand Vacations, but he understood it better than we did, including all of our frustrations and fears about rising maintenance fees, special assessments, difficulty booking and just the issues dealing with HGV in general. In the interest of keeping this short-ish, I'll outline what they promised us. 

• 200 Nights of vacations at Krystal Resorts around the world - to be used over the next 10 years. 

• Buying us out of our Hilton membership (supposedly as a large corporate entity they could do this and basically write it off as a loss...it made sense at the time...)

• Discounted flights twice a year through a third party exchange

• 25% of any other vacations booked through the Krystal Portal. 

It wasn't cheap by any stretch, but after saying no three or four times, they finally got us. We drank the champagne, signed the paperwork, and were on our way, feeling great...for about a day...

That night after 2 or 7 drinks, I started looking the company up (something I tried to do during the meeting with no success), and I started to get worried. There's basically nothing about this company online, and what does exist is horrible (I hope to add to that!). I tried all the travel websites along with reddit and facebook, and just got more and more worried. "Grayson" tried to reassure me that everything was progressing fine, but after a couple more days spent worrying about it instead of enjoying our trip, we made the call. Cancelled via email and also went into town to mail a certified letter. If we hadn't been 3 hours away we would have done it in person as well. Mexico has a 5 day recission period, and we were well within that, so the folks at Krystal, after a few complaints, agreed to the cancellation, on the condition that we would not take any action against them or post any negative comments online. And...we were fine with that as long as we got our money back. 

Then, the least surprising thing ever happened - that's right, NOTHING! No refund, no contact, no answers. Even my buddy Grayson stopped answering texts. Luckily we had documented everything, and even opened up a complaint with our bank while still in Mexico "Just in case", which was fortunate. We sent all 50 pages of documentation to the bank once we were home, and about a month later the money was back in our hands. I won't lie...we felt like the world's biggest idiots for a while, but at the end of the day we won and it felt good. These folks scam a LOT of people, and while it wasn't pretty, we got our free stuff, saw through their lies, and came out ok. The best part? I got confirmation it was all fake. Obviously at Krystal the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand, because a few weeks after all this went down, I got an email granting me access to their site, and unsurprisingly, it was all lies. 200 free nights? Lies. The free flights? Lies. Buying us out of Hilton?...cant 100% confirm, but seemed shady as hell, and we'd have probably been stuck with both. At the end of the day, we'd have paid close to 20K for the privilege of getting 25% of Krystal Hotels (and nothing else), if we booked through their site. That's it. What a joke...

So yeah, some of their hotels seem nice enough (read the other reviews for that), but when it comes to the vacation club, RUN, dont walk out the door. The mediocre breakfast and free stuff isn't worth 3 hours of your life and sanity.