Dear Editor,
I am writing about an article in the June 9 edition of The Daily Herald: “Towers employees left frustrated after meeting with management”.
My concern isn’t with the subject of the article, though I do sympathize with the “more than 60 employees” (according to your article) that are losing so much income that will no doubt result in hardships, and with the fact that they are receiving no concrete information from The Towers, their employer.
I wanted to note that The Towers is a timeshare property, and I am an owner of one week in one of the units there. However, throughout the article, the property is referred to as a “hotel”.
Many of us owners have tried numerous times to get information from the Towers management and what we do get is clearly inaccurate and misleading, and we are given the run-around, likely in the hopes that we will just be quiet and go away.
Part of the large maintenance fee we each pay annually is to cover insurance for the property. This means that there should have been a pay-out by the insurance company after Hurricane Irma, The Towers should have been repaired, the property should now be available to the owners that invested in vacation weeks there.
For a time, we were asked to pay our annual maintenance fees, but this was for a property that was essentially non-existent and not available to us. Certainly there was no maintenance and, again, insurance should have covered the damage. Most of us did pay the maintenance fee for 2018, the year immediately after Irma, but received nothing for it. We don’t know what that year’s fees were used for.
There is no communication to us from The Towers.
Instead, nothing has been done. We started hearing reports that, although The Towers was not available to the vacation owners, several staff – including Clarence Derby, General Manager – were living there. I have no problem with that in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane if housing was an issue during a crisis. However, the residency seems to have become permanent or long-term.
Then we started becoming aware of the property being used as a hotel. When we contacted The Towers for clarification, they denied it but, clearly the report was correct. The Towers timeshare owners are being kept from using their timeshare weeks, but anyone else could rent the units as hotel rooms.
We have contacted government officials, The Daily Herald, certainly The Towers and all to no avail. Mr. Ansari and his company have done as they please for their own benefit to the detriment of St. Maarteners that were employed at his property, timeshare owners that invested their vacation dollars there, and the country’s reputation. This goes all the way back to the destruction of Mullet Bay Resort by Hurricane Luis in 1995.
The government seems powerless to do anything to rectify the situation, neither for its own people that are impacted by losing jobs nor for The Towers timeshare owners that have enjoyed visiting St. Maarten year after year. I retired last year and, though I’ve only visited St. Maarten three times in the 27 years that we’ve owned – and paid maintenance fees – at The Towers (our friends also used our timeshare unit 3 times), was looking forward to now being able to spend more time there.
There is now the sense that Mr. Ansari et al are waiting us out, until we get tired of
this struggle, until we all leave.
As well, there has been a discussion (on a Towers Owners discussion board) that perhaps there is a loophole that if we don’t pay maintenance fees for a certain period, we will forfeit our ownerships. However, the paying of maintenance fees should go hand in hand with the ability to access and use the property in top condition … RCI’s Gold rating to be exact.
There has been a failure in this on so many levels. We feel mistreated and duped.
And now our timeshare property is officially being called a “hotel”.
Wishing you health and safety during these unprecedented times.
Rosemary Rudyk
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
