Students who received phone calls stating they won a free trip to Florida from a contest at one of three Village bars should be cautious before committing, according to the Better Business Bureau.
Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel, which conducted vacation giveaways at The Locker Room, Dill Street Bar & Grill and Scotty's Brewhouse, has an unsatisfactory business performance record, according to Dolores Liberatore, vice president of the Better Business Bureau of Central Florida.
"They have a pattern of unanswered complaints and governmental action against them," Liberatore said.
According to Liberatore, 262 complaints, mostly about dissatisfaction with services rendered, have been filed against the travel agency in the past three years. Fifty-six have gone unanswered, and 73 have been transferred to the Florida attorney general's office.
Justin Kline, manager of Dill Street Bar & Grill, 421 N. Dill St., said he plans to contribute to the list.
According to Kline, the travel agency gave away a legitimate trip to a customer every night Feb. 7-9 and Feb. 12. In the days following Mardi Gras, Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel called everyone who applied for the trip, Kline said.
"The people they contacted assumed they won the trip," he said. "That's where the problem came from."
Kline had heard of the company while he was at a bar last year in Bloomington. He said he assumed that because they were still operating a year later, they were legitimate.
Kline said he has received calls from six customers who were contacted by the agency and told they had won vacation packages.
"That's six too many people saying, 'What's going on here?'" Kline said. "I don't want to be associated with a company that is ripping people off."
According to Kline, there was no money exchanged between the travel agency and the bar, and Dill Street employees took no part in promoting the contest.
Laura Selvey, manager of The Locker Room, 1625 W. University Ave., said she knew Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel would be offering discounted Florida trips, but she said she was unaware of its bad performance record.
According to Selvey, the company contacted her the day before they conducted the contest, leaving her little time to do background research.
Selvey also said there was no money exchanged between her bar and the travel agency.
"We just provided them with a table," she said. "Our servers didn't give away tickets or collect names or anything."
Selvey said she questioned why the agency would want to do promotions in the bar for free. An employee at Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel told her the company was interested in collecting names for sales leads.
One of these sales leads ended up being senior Meredith Lord.
Lord entered the travel contest on Mardi Gras at The Locker Room. She received a phone call from the agency on Feb. 25 telling her she had won the vacation.
Lord said she was skeptical at first but continued to listen just in case the contest proved to be legitimate. She said the travel agency offered a 10-day vacation that included free lodging at Orlando, Daytona Beach and Key West.
According to Lord, the solicitor then claimed the package was worth $2,500 and that she would be asked to pay a promotional fee of $398. Lord said she told the woman she could not afford to spend that money in February and asked if the agency would call back in March.
The saleswoman tried pressuring Lord to committing to at least half the cost that night and half when she made reservations, Lord said. Eventually, according to Lord, the saleswoman reluctantly agreed to call back later.
"She made it sound like it was a big, huge hassle to call back in four days," she said.
After the phone call, Lord said she heard about numerous students receiving similar phone calls and grew skeptical.
"If they do call me back, I am going to ask them why the entire campus won," she said with a laugh.
Junior Renee Ullmann said she received a phone call in which a salesman claimed he was calling from Dill Street to tell her she had won a vacation.
According to Ullmann, the salesman quickly hung up on her after she told him she could not remember filling out an application.
Ullmann said she thinks travel agencies like Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel take advantage of the relaxed bar atmosphere.
"Drunk people are easy targets," she said.
College students in general can sometimes be easy targets for scams, according to Valerie M. Verduce, an attorney with the southeast region of the Federal Trade Commission. Verduce said college students have a degree of acceptance when it comes to questionable sales pitches.
According to Verduce, many trips have hidden catches, such as timeshare presentations. To avoid hidden catches, Verduce suggested students who win trips get an explanation of the trip and all of its costs in writing before accepting the package.
She also said consumers should never give their credit card number over the phone during a phone solicitation, especially if the salesperson is pushy.
"If someone tells you they only have so many packages left and they will be gone in an hour, maybe you should let it go in an hour," she said. "If it sounds too good to be true ,it probably is."
Neither Scotty's Brewhouse nor Cape Canaveral Tour and Travel were available for comment.
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