Being part of an organization can really give many benefits to its members but having said that if the organization is not recognizing a market or not foreseeing the problems which might develop to affect the other market one company should not give up and continue fighting its battle.

TATOC

We have worked very closely with TATOC for many years. They helped us with information, legal documentation and support protecting the rights of the members of different clubs our clients.

 

OTE

Help Line International has joined Organisation for Timeshare in Europe (now known as RDO) at a time of it's creation since we always believe that industry should unite to promote itself in public, protect its interests by lobbing the legislation all over Europe and withstand the timeshare fraud and bad practice.

Our membership last from 1999 till 2008.

We have actively participated in the work of OTE.

 

We have also strongly promoted OTE to Russian speakers and translated into Russian at our own expense and with the agreement with OTE and maintained the Russian website www.ote-info.ru  .

Later we turned that website into a timeshare educational project OTE (Общедоступная Таймшер Энциклопедия) General Timeshare Encyclopaedia powered by ourselves.

 

In early 2000 the Russia was flooded by timeshare resale crooks who claimed to be UK based companies, which was not true.

We estimate that just during their first year they picked up over 750.000 Euro from the victim clients. We were brave to stand up against the fraudulent activity of more then 10 crook companies.

We faced threats and danger to us personally and to the business operations.

We really needed the support from our European colleagues to stop these bad practise, which we really felt we could.

But unfortunately we did not get any support from OTE.

OTE has openly told us that this problem is not of their interest especially that they considered that Russia is not Europe disrespect that Russians were buying the European timeshare products.  

It’s was sad since later these resale schemes hit also the Europe.

 

We realised that we better rely on our direct contacts and business partners who are directly or indirectly involved with the Russian market then the organization which would not provide any support to its member.

We made our decision not to proceed with OTE since it could not give us what we needed.

 

ARDA

We joined ARDA in 2000 because we shared the ideas and goals with this association and thought to become a part of something big and important.

 

But then we found ourselves in the same organisation with a fraudulant Russian company with whom we would not want to be associated.

Of cause we would not blame ARDA since they could not know what is happening in a faraway country where they have only one other member, but for us there was unfortunately no other decision but to leave ARDA before the fraudulent company disappears with hundreds of thousands Euro of the victim clients which did happen two years later.