Well I guess it's not really a scam....but they are a little sneaky.

Here is the story about what happened to us. So I know there are a lot of these supposed great deals flying around out there - a lot of them come from the Bass Pro shops, and others at various trade shows. All offering a great 2 night vacation at the Wisconsin Dells - for only $99!! There's a variety of things they promise you such as visa gift cards, dining certificates, etc. Then after they suck you in, they say "all you have to do is go on a short 90 minute bus ride around their property at Christmas Mountain.". Well that's what the guy told us who sucked us in. And other people I talked to who got the same deal were told the same thing and one couple weren't even told about the tour they'd have to go on!

So we book out 2 night vacation and we're told if we don't show up, we get billed the entire price of the full price of what our stay would have cost at the going rate. We get out to the welcome center where we are told to check in and they ask for our ID's and credit card. We give them our credit/debit card which is the only one we use and it was also the one we paid the $99 with at the booth at the trade show. The guy said the card was fine to use. But apparantly it was not! They needed a major credit card, not a debit/credit card, cause they want to be able to check our credit in case we want to buy into their program at the tour the next day. ERGH. I do have a major credit card but I haven't used it in ages and I don't plan to use it. It was at home. I called my bank and they were able to give me the credit card number and expiry date but that wasnt good enough for them. They then told us we could still stay at the hotel but we'd have to pay full price and we couldn't go on the tour so we wouldn't get any of the free gifts we were promised. We were so upset! After driving all this way, taking the time off, and now we were going to have to pay even more. Finally after calling all kinds of supervisors, the girl said if I could access my bank account online and print out something showing my visa card account was active, then they'd accept that. Since it's an account I rarely use, I had to call the bank again to reset my login info for online banking and all that took about half an hour. They did let me use their computer there and print it out. But it ended up taking us 2 hours to sort everything out! We didn't get to our hotel until after 6pm so the day was gone already and then they couldn't get us scheduled for a tour until noon the next day - our only day there and a big chunk of it would be taken up at this tour. They said if we didn't show up for the tour, then we'd be charged the full price of the entire trip. Geez!

So we packed as much as we could into our one day. We got up super early to ride the duck tours, play mini golf then we were at the tour place by 11:30 as we didn't want to be late and get charged for anything. Our "90 min bus tour" was actually a 90 minute slideshow presentation in a small stuffy room. Repetitive and boring. THEN after that, each couple/family was assigned to a sales person who tried to get us to sign up. We told her numerous times we were not in the position to sign up right now, that we own our own business and don't have time to travel, etc. She called her supervisor over and he tried even harder. We finally told them that if we ever want to go on vacation or have time to, then we are able to use my inlaws Disney club vacation points. They at first didn't know how to top that, cause how do you top something that's free?? But they still tried and I was started to get pissed off cause now they were just wasting our time, as we said so many time we weren't interested. They even insisted that we go for a short tour of the property and see one of the townhomes and we ended up having to take our salesgirl in our own car for the tour so we didn't have to wait for the bus. It was very weird. Also I'm 8.5 months pregnant which she knew about all along and I was like "ok, we were told it was only 90 minutes and we've been here over 2 hours, I really need to go get some food" and she said "oh, well I have some M&M's" and I said "no thanks, I mean real food". and she ended up keeping us almost another hour!! So 3 hours of our day had been wasted. We did get the $50 visa card as promised but we were told to only use it at gift stores as if we try using it at restaurants then they hold back 20% for gratuity. Then we got a $100 dining dough certificate as promised as well, but there was only 1 restaurant within 30 miles that we could use it at! So they told us to take it home to Chicago with us as we might have better luck finding a restaurant closer to us there.

So yes they were pushy. I wish they had just listened to us in the first place and we would have been out of there an hour and a half earlier. They were really friendly, but again, pushy.

We did love the hotel we got to stay at, the Chula Vista Resort and we'd love to go back there again one day. The rest of our trip was great, but dealing with all the BlueGreen people was the only frustrating part.