By Eleanor Momberg
A blogger is being sued for defamation by the RCI-affiliated Quality Vacation Club (QVC) for criticising it on his website Insights and Rants.
Donn Edwards was phoned by a telemarketer last year and told that he had won a car. All he would have to do to claim his prize, he was told, was attend a prize-giving ceremony in Midrand, north of Johannesburg.
When he and his wife arrived at the venue, they discovered that the prize-giving ceremony was a QVC marketing presentation at which he and his wife, and the other "guests", were told to choose a key, after the airing of a video, to determine if he had won the car. He had not.
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'Now that their secret is out on the web' Edwards wrote about his experience, and his unhappiness about being misled, on his blog. He said that the telemarketers - who contacted him again six weeks later with an invitation to attend another prize-giving presentation, despite his name being placed on a list of people not to be called - had emphatically denied that they were marketing or selling any form of timeshare.
He also alleged that QVC and the company it had employed to market its product had violated the Timeshare Institute of Southern Africa's code of conduct by not clearly stating in their fax to his wife that the presentation they were to attend as competition finalists was for any other purpose; that none of the gifts or prizes, or the names of previous winners, were on display at the venue as required by the code; and that the telesales person had not made it clear that the purpose of the contact was to sell timeshare.
He concluded in his blog of September last year that "QVC has deliberately and knowingly set up a business venture with MargetMagix in order to flout or bypass the letter and spirit of the code of conduct, and they clearly think they can do so with impunity".
'They're trying to bully me into keeping quiet'
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