from the Chamber of Commerce...

There is still an ongoing problem with timeshare sales personnel. Several instances of aggression have been reported. This situation will be brought up to Minister Heredia and the Town Council at the next opportunity to meet with them.

They are brutal and seem to have mini-booths EVERYWHERE.

Who can you report them to?

I'd talk to the Tacklebox bouncer!

"Who can you report them to?"

Town Council.

I have had a week of "timeshare" salesman,drug dealers , teenage scam artists,and thieves. On Thurs. while a group of us were doing yoga on a friends beach we saw a timeshare salesman haranguing tourist on the beach. We stopped and were watching him , seeing us he began screaming at us ."I can do what I want to here, you gringos go home to your own country etc (Many expletives). Yes, my friend did call the authorities (nothing)
Two days later my grandchildren were sitting on our pier and were approached to buy drugs twice within an hour. Same day their snorkling stuff was stolen from the same pier while they were swimming under it. Yesterday, I watched the kids feeding crocodiles and of course , still using the ploy of raising money for a basketball team. When that didn't fly they started harrassing them verbally. I can only guess how impressed these tourists were with our island. Before anyone asks, yes I have contacted the authorities over and over to no avail. Hopefully, someone else can succeed in putting a stop it all this.

Suggest sending this info to San Pedro Business Association - I have copied Lovey's message to them today, but it would be better coming directly from the writer.

Might be interesting to contact the BTB with all these instances of problems of timeshare? BTB iussues the hotel licenses for the folks who offer timeshare. If these organizations have not license they can host guests and they can't sell timeshare ........ a series individual complaints (truthful and numerous) to BTB may have effects - has this been tried?

I guess we were just lucky, in the 1st week of March we were approached twice by the same guy on a bicycle who mumbled an offer of "weed", and the only timeshare people we ran into was at Central Park, we listened to his offers for a couple of minutes & politely declined, he gave us his card & assured us that he could get us discounts on tours. After that we just sort of steered around the booths & were never approached again. We never saw an instance of any crime whatsoever, although we didn't take any special precautions. It was our first visit, and it was a good one. I'd like to believe our experience was pretty normal.

Not that it will make much difference, but I'm pulling the reviews and listings of timeshares that are particularly egregious offenders (such as two well-known North Ambergris resorts) from the new editions of travel guidebooks that I do. At least they won't get any more publicity from me.

--Lan Sluder

That's a great idea, no publicity, can't hurt. What we did with the time share folks was simply say, "we've been there" and keep walking. I've been to other countries where the harrassment is much more intense than SP. We had a couple that would start out, "Hey are you from the states?" To which I replied, "nope we're from Belize!" The look on their face was simply confusion!

I have also been verbally (and loudly) abused by them when I have asked them to leave our alley (near the BYC and Dory Street). This alleyway seems to be one of their prime "drag strips" they like to fly down to see if they can catch some tourists walking the beach there. When I point out that they are more than 10 feet from their booth, they begin screaming expletives and basically the same as what Lovey & Thurston report above. There either has to be some way for business owners to stop them or there have to be tourist police readily available to stop them.