This is an old scam. We'll give you this great vacation and all you have to do is sit through a two hour pitch for a timeshare in our crappy hotel. Sometimes it's really sad, like the place we stayed at in Tahoe when we last went skiing. They offered us a free meal at the really bad hotel restaurant to sit through the two hour pitch. No thanks. But today was something new and different.

I got a phone call from Hilton, where I'm a member of their HHonors program, just like I'm a member of every other airline and hotel program because, well, why not? Now I know why not. The insistent woman was offering me a "great deal" on a stay in their shiny new Vegas hotel in return for the two hour sales pitch. Indeed, it was maybe half the street value of the room, but she took great offense when I refused to talk about personal details with her ("what would you like to do in Vegas?"), saying I don't generally divulge those sorts of things to telemarketers. "I'm not a telemarketer!" Yes honey, you are. I ultimately hung up.

So sad. There's really no easy way to tell Hilton how unhappy I am with this sort of telemarketing. It's not like I can stop staying at Hilton hotels. They're often the official hotel of whatever event I'm attending.

So instead, I'll just grouse here a bit. I think I feel better now.

Are those things usually legit? I remember when my wife and I got married, we got all kinds of offers like that. We decided to check one out, where in return for attending some sort of cookware demonstration, we would get two or three nights for free at some resort. We went to the demonstration, but never really had enough money to contemplate airfare to whatever Mexican resort was being offered. We always wondered if the offer was for real, though, and why it could possibly be to the benefit of the hotel to give away free stays for people simply watching something about pots and pans...

Interesting. The Hilton folks haven't tried that with me yet. Perhaps your spending pattern on the HHonors program somehow indicates you're more of a traveler/vacationer than I am.

They count on that.