Little Surprises Around Every Corner
But nothing dangerous! - Willy Wonka
You never know what little surprises lie around every corner when faced with a new adventure!
About a week after closing on the purchase of the hotel, our manager at the time (we’ll call him AJ - all names changed for privacy) came to Mark and told him that an ex-pat woman in town wanted to come up for lunch. We thought this was a little strange as our restaurant was not open to the public.
AJ told us that she had a ‘connection to the hotel’, had been up for lunch before, and he thought we should meet her. AJ seemed nervous to ask us, which didn’t seem too odd as he’d only known us a short time.
We said ‘ok’, and an hour later, Judy from Canada showed up at the hotel. AJ welcomed her, and nervously brought her to meet us. We sat down together and exchanged pleasantries. Judy didn’t know Gomer had sold the hotel until she called AJ to come up for lunch. She said she wanted to meet her new “co-owners”, and she said to us proudly, “I’m an owner of Villa 2”. 😱
Little surprise #1.
Um, excuse me, WTF? I was stunned silent. As I sat in my chair, trying with all my power not to throw up, I looked at AJ who had a knowing look on his face.
She said, “I thought you knew.” She then explained the history. When Gomer wanted to build two of the large villas at the hotel, he got investors to help fund the construction.
Calmly, Mark asked her how many investors she was talking about. “Oh Mark, we’re not investors”, she corrected, “we’re co-owners”. She said there were 5 co-owners for each villa, 10 in total! Um, excuse me, WTF? 10?!?! 😳
Judy said, “We each put in $50,000, and we’re supposed to receive 20% of the profits from those villas, we get a free week stay annually, and we can come at other times for lunch or to use the pool.” Thus, the call for lunch.
Little surprise #2.
Um, excuse me, WTF? Nope, Gomer failed to mention any of this.
Slight panic rising in me, Mark, always the calm, level-headed one, nicely said, “I’m really sorry to tell you this Judy, but we purchased the assets of the hotel – not Gomer’s business, and our name is the only one on the title (free and clear). If you have a claim of ownership, it’s against Gomer, not us.”
We had been advised by our Costa Rican attorney to structure the purchase as a bulk sale, which in Costa Rica means that the proceeds of the sale are held in escrow for 30 days and released to the seller only if there are no third-party claims made within those 30 days.
Mark explained this to Judy and said, “I’d suggest you contact your attorney to file a claim and reach out to the other investors as well. You have about 3 weeks left to do this.”
Judy, realizing that she had been scammed, looked very sad. With our attorney’s contact information and a copy of the notice of hotel sale that had appeared in the national newspaper, La Gaceta, Judy left.
I still had a strange feeling we might have missed something, but I know Mark and his business acumen. He assured me we did everything correctly, and we contacted our attorney to give him the heads up on the potential claim.
As expected, Judy contacted the other investors, who all filed a joint claim against Gomer. We were contacted by a few of the investors. They weren’t angry with us, but they were heartbroken. They had fallen in love with this beautiful spot on the planet the same way we had.
One couple, who had been married at the hotel on Valentine’s Day years prior, had made an annual tradition of spending a week or two in “their villa” always around their anniversary. We felt so bad for them and the other duped investors that we made a special offer to them – for as long as we owned the hotel, they could visit with advanced notice for up to one week per year at 50% off of our regular rates.
The Valentine’s Day couple were the only investors that took us up on our offer, and it was so sweet have them visit every year to celebrate. 💜
As we were negotiating our purchase contract with Gomer, he would share details sparingly. He was always very guarded with any information we sought. We felt he couldn’t be trusted so we only believed about half of what he was saying – the trouble was figuring out which half was true!
One time, he mentioned that he had donated a few hotel stays to charitable organizations that were ‘close to his heart’ for their fundraisers. That made sense to us because we planned to do the same for our philanthropic causes. He assured us that there were ‘maybe 2 or 3’ hotel stays that hadn’t yet been realized. He asked us to honor these commitments because the guests were usually big spenders (big bar tabs!) and because they provided great word of mouth advertisements. We agreed.
A few weeks into our ownership, our reservation manager began receiving calls and emails from people claiming they won a hotel stay at an auction for so-and-so charity. We checked the names of the organizations that Gomer had told us about, but the people calling were not from the organizations that he listed.
Call after call kept coming in with requests for their ‘free’ 5-night stay here, a 7-night stay there, and on and on…There weren’t just ‘2 or 3’ hotel stays as Gomer had told us. In all, there were about 15 hotel stays equaling 114 hotel nights!
Little surprise #3.
When looking to buy this specific hotel, a big benefit to us was that the hotel was a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH), a prestigious grouping of luxury, boutique hotels. We were at that time, the only SLH hotel in our region of Costa Rica.
When it was time for us to renew our membership, SLH told us that the hotel (read: Gomer!!!) owed SLH $110,000! Um, excuse me, WTF?
Little surprise #4.
A few months later, the reservation manager called me in a panic. A guest had called to arrange transportation for a stay that was not in our reservation system. The guest mentioned that he found the unit online where he booked and paid for the stay. He sent us the correspondence he had with the ‘host’.
Guess what? Apparently, Gomer had rooms listed on AirBnB that he didn’t disclose to us. He took the booking for the room and took the payment—for a hotel room he didn’t even own anymore!
Little surprise #5.
In the end, the ‘investors’ had a successful claim against Gomer and got their money back.
We also had some leverage with Gomer and were able to recover from him the cost of all the little surprises with only a bit of arm-twisting.
And as Willy Wonka might have said to him: “You stole the fizzy lifting drinks, so you get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”
See what I mean? All these little surprises that came around every corner weren’t dangerous for us at all. And now I try to keep that in mind whenever I’m faced with new little surprises.
Holy smokes!!!! 😮😮😮😮😮
Every time I read a surprise I thought that was it. Then there was another one! Man, you two went through a LOT. I applaud you for sounding so level headed about it!
Wowza!
My nerves would’ve been shot! Kudos to you both. I love reading your story!