The European Commission is cracking down on holiday timeshare rip-offs that cost consumers more than £4bn a year, the Financial Times reported last week...

The European Commission on Thursday unveiled plans to extend the legal protection enjoyed by timeshare owners to the resale of their holiday slots, holiday clubs and part-owners of caravans and canal boats.

It would give customers a right to full information, including a written contract in their native language, and enable them to cancel the deal within 14 days. It would also ban deposits during that time and make it more complicated to charge extra fees, such as vague administration charges, from the customers.

Recently, the Doğan News Agency reported about a Turkish couple accused of selling villas with fake deeds in southern Turkey. The Turkish couple was accused of cheating approximately 50 million pounds sterling from foreign property buyers in one of the biggest scandals in Turkey's booming coastal property market.

The victims of the fraud were primarily UK citizens looking to buy summer homes in Bodrum and Didim on the Aegean coast. The couple is alleged to have sold scores of villas using fake deeds.

Consumers denied their rights

Meglena Kuneva, the EU consumer commissioner, said that holiday homes and time share products remain a high-pressure sales environment and that many new products come on to the market that are not covered by existing laws. “Customers are being denied their rights and the practices of rogue traders bring legitimate business operators into disrepute,” she explained.

European consumer protection agencies received thousands of complaints a year, most relating to the newer areas. UK consumers lose £1.2bn (€1.7bn, $2.4bn) a year, according to the Office of Fair Trading, and total EU losses could be more than triple that, the Commission says.

Willy Winterfalk, who runs a campaign group for Scandinavian victims of summer house scams, said in the FT: “We know of at least 100,000 families in Europe who have lost money. I have been fighting the industry for 16 years. The scams are always the same, just the name plate on the door is different.”

Timeshare, where owners buy the right to occupy holiday property for a fixed number of weeks for a number of years, has become a big industry in the European Union, with 1,500 resorts employing 40,000 people and turning over more than €2bn a year.

The Commission, which recently capped mobile phone roaming charges, is eager to shed its distant bureaucratic image and be seen as a champion of consumer rights.

Turkey ‘losing prestige’

Victims of holiday scams often find it hard to pursue legal claims in foreign countries. Most of the 1.5m owners come from richer, northern member states such as France, the UK and Germany. Spain accounts for 40 per cent of the timeshare destination market.

Ranking third in the sales of second residence and summer homes in Europe after Spain and Greece, Turkey has lost a lot of prestige and dropped to seventh according to Doğan News Agency.

In Didim and Bodrum, it was reported that about 13,000 villas and lots were sold to foreigners in the last year yet only 3,500 of them were officially registered and it was revealed that the deeds of the rest, supposed to be handed over with contracts, were not still delivered.

The FT report said that Ian McCartney, UK consumer minister, welcomed the proposal, which will have to be approved by EU countries and the European Parliament.

Consumer groups said the deposit rule would improve confidence in the industry. “There are people who have bought timeshare slots and can no longer use them, but nobody wants to buy because the reputation of the industry is so bad,” Sandy Grey, of the Timeshare Consumers' Association, said.

Source: Turkish Daily news