Hallmark Travel

Hallmark Travel has not been in operation for over a year. The owner, Bill Corrigan, passed away Feb 15^th 2011.
Any listings or postings on this site of Hallmark Travel should be taken down from this site. They are irrelevant.
God rest his Irish soul.

I signed up for this and it has been wonderful
I travel 4 – 7 times a year and have never been displeased with the hotels or service. This has been perfect for me and allowed me to travel more than I could ever imagine. I am thankful I was contacted by them
Even if I walked in their door as the biggest skeptic. After learning how to maximize the system, it has been awesome!

ok so again i went on my vacation and had a great time i got a phone call from a young woman about 6 months ago for a las vegas vacation and my wife and i actualy took the trip and were put in a decent hotel and near the strip and i won money i say go check it out for yourself and get the vacation and it was great i would do it again

Just in case anyone is wondering, these guys are still active and calling. I’ve received a call a day from these folks. Annoying! Don’t fall for their scams.

Hallmark Travel (aka Pulaski Tours) is back at it again. Just received a call from someone who said that «since I enjoyed my vacation after my last visit with them, they wanted to invite me back again.» When I informed the guy that I never went on any vacation from them and that they might want to delete me from their calling list since the Contra Costa District Attorney is investigating them and has interviewed me for their case, he promptly hung up :-)

These guys have really got some juice behind them. They got my number when I entered a drawing at the Mushroom Mardi Gras in Morgan Hill, where they had a row of touch screens set up. It was pretty high tech and the impression was that this was somehow tied into the event. I gave them some rudimentary info and figured I’d never hear from them again, you know, like any other stupid contest.
Today, however, I received a call from a young lady at Pulaski Travel in Concord bearing the exciting news that I have been selected to receive a fabulous prize! Oh joy! She informed me that I had my choice of three-​day vacations in either Las Vegas or San Diego, hotel and airfare included, good for up to a year from the date of issue. No purchase required! Wow! All I have to do is drive up to Concord and pick it up!
(and join them for a 90 minute presentation)
OK, that’s the bait. Pretty standard stuff. Come on down to our office and sit through a sales pitch and you will be rewarded.
I told them that I was really busy and that I couldn’t schedule anything right now, so they’re going to call me back next week to confirm the tentative date I gave them. I figured it was just a good old-​fashioned timeshare presentation, but these reviews have given me pause to think. I definitely won’t be wasting the time and gas on this one.
Thanks, Unilocal

This company in conjunction with Pulaski tickets and Tours are trying to entice me into attending their 90 minute hard sell presentation tomorrow.
I have been bombarded with call by these ladies who need a little lecture in how to speak English (one of them asked me if I was engaged with my computer or my fax machine so I can view her email /​fax that they were going to send me immediately!) and how to speak a sentence only once (they kept repeating the same stuff 10 times like they were trying to brainwash me).
After I received their email invitation a few minutes ago, I decided to Google their info and I found exactly what I had in mind.
Thank you all for doing this. We should spread these on a lot more sites and also complain to the Better Business Bureau in Concord, CA to investigate in to their business practices. I am in San Jose and they wanted me to drive 60 miles to listen to their BS. As everyone else, I almost got a litte greedy (free air tkts for 2 + 2 night stay) and thought of taking a chance but I am glad I googled.

Just went to a seminar mainly to get my «free» 2 night weekender at the Hyatt. Also to obtain my $ 50.00 Mastercard gift card. After listening to a seminar (wanting me to spend $ 7000 to become a travel agent and get «wholesale» travel) for over a hour I walked out with a certificate to mail in for the Hyatt that the arrival dates are for Monday and Tuesday… not the weekend! There are too many other estrictions to list. Also, the $ 50.00 gift card is still not activated and probably never will be. Tomorrow will be the 3^rd day that I received it and a million more excuses as to why it is not activated. False advertising and false promises. A big waste of time. Don’t get sucked in. I wish I didn’t. Then again, I learned my lesson the hard way.

Hallmark Travel/​
Only gave 1 star because I couldn’t give a negative star.
BEWARE IF YOU SEE A LOT OF POSITIVE REVIEWS AFTER MY POSTING. THEY ARE NOW AWARE OF Unilocal.
I just hung up with a very defensive and rude agent because I called to cancel my appointment today, Sunday, Nov. 23 at 9:45AM. The agent immediately corrected me that my appointment was at 10AM. I said, but I was told twice we had to be there at 9:45AM to sign in so I considered my appointment to be at 9:45AM.
I explained that I had just read reviews on Unilocal that confirmed my suspicions about the company — that it was a scam that used gimmicks.
As he was writing down the reason for my cancellation to give to his supervisor, and repeating to me what he was writing, he reconfirmed the spelling of Unilocal (obviously never heard of it) and gave me a lecture about it not being a scam. SO, NOW THAT THEY KNOW ABOUT Unilocal, I AM SURE YOU’LL SEE SOME POSITIVE REVIEWS FROM POSTERS WITH SUSPICIOUS CONNECTIONS TO THE COMPANY.
I also said that another reason we no longer want to go is that we did not appreciate being called the day before (a Saturday) at 8AM to reconfirm our appointment. The agent told me that calling at 8AM is legal. I said, it may be legal but on a Saturday morning for working people, it is rude.
Then he called me a SHEEP for following what people wrote on the Internet!!! I said, and that is another reason for my knowing I made the right decision to cancel.
We had a vibrant discussion about why it is fine OR not fine for them to charge people a ‘good faith’ deposit for taxes. I said that the taxes should not be paid by people until their reservation is actually confirmed. He said that a lot of people don’t even use what they won so they need to charge in advance.
I countered that if you are giving people a gift, then it is an out of pocket expense anyway. It’s like buying a gift certificate at Neiman Marcus for a friend’s birthday. Your friend may never use it but it doesn’t matter, you gave the gift. In this case, it would simply be a gift certificate for which the friend would need to pay tax on the purchases made with it. And, the tax should not be charged until the moment of purchase — NOT IN ADVANCE. So regarding Hallmark Travel/​Pulaski Tickets and Tours, you should only pay the moment you are advised that your hotel, air ticket, or whatever is actually confirmed — NOT IN ADVANCE.
I know for a fact from a cruise we supposedly won after attending a timeshare some years ago that actually getting your prize is a feat in and of itself. You have to give your preferred dates months in advance and you won’t know till shortly before the trip which date you got. And, if you cannot book within the allowed time frame (in this case it was 18 months), you lose your good faith deposit that miraculously converts into an Administrative Fee.
I probably would not have bothered to post this but you may thank the agent for making me feel it was important to do so.

I have been part of this organization for over 4 years. It has allowed me to travel very inexpensively to very nice places as well as if I ever wanted to participate in being a travel agent the support and resources are fantastic. It’s not for everyone but timeshares use the same «strategies» to get you in the door. 2 free tickets to Las Vegas but most of those come with restrictions. So as it maybe not be for everyone it is something that I don’t feel is a waste of time.

UPDATE: if you want to see the script used on my call — here it is – found on the internet.
another link to info about them
Thanks for the reviews — this was really helpful. My husband and I got home from a trip abroad and a friend staying at our house just left a message. When I called back, I got someone claiming to be the «director of the company,» who said that I could get the prizes of either an SUV, $ 25K, a cruise or a flat screen t.v. He asked me lots of «confirming questions,» which I now realize were so broad that they could have described anyone. Btw. ages of 35 – 70 and with salary over $ 45K. Then he gave me a claim number and detailed directions to the office.
I was guaranteed to win a prize. Now, I think that after the promo sales job, I would probably «win» the cruise with tons of restrictions and a chance to spend money with the company to upgrade, etc. etc.
anyway, I am grateful for you all for having saved me from taking this up. My mom does alot of the free condo weekend things and I was thinking of trying it just to see what happened, but I really have better things to do this weekend.
p. s., just to give some juice to the internet, address is 2190 Meridien Park, Suite M and phone number is 866−450−3355.
cheers.

Thank you everyone for sharing. I received a phone message today. I don’t trust any of these gimmicks, but had to make the call to find out just what co. was behind it so I could look it up. Thank goodness for the Internet. Your reviews are most helpful. In my case the telemarketer didn’t mention marital status as a stipulation. I did not make an appt.; hope they don’t keep calling and bugging me as has happened to so many others.
I don’t know how the can keep up the scam with so many scurrilous reviews all over the Internet.

If we can stop anyone else from attending this utter waste of time and arguably fraudulent exercise — please learn from our participation.
We received the same targeted mailer directing us to call to claim free RT airline tickets and a free week-​long rental car, in the same manner as others who have posted here. We called the noted number and reached a «marketing» enterprise in Arizona, «Perfekt Marketing,» which pitched us to attend a 90-​minute seminar at this travel office. The opener (Sierra) and the closer (Kay) mentioned several restrictions associated with the plane tickets, and none with the rental car, outside of attending the seminar.
We attended the seminar, where we were given a hard-​sell by a team of representatives to buy into a travel program which would turn us into travel agents and make us eligible for reduced-​cost travel packages. We politely endured the presentations and, near the end of the 90 minutes, requested the round-​trip tickets and rental car. The representative then sitting with us reluctantly provided us with two highly-​restrictive vouchers, and asked us to sign a waiver which, among other things, disavowed any reliance by us on the representations used by the «marketing» company to get us to participate. When I explained to the representative that the only reason we attended was to claim the plane tickets and rental car as described to us by the telemarketers, the representative was miffed. He saw nothing wrong with the travel agency attempting to get around the promises made to us on the phone. We refused to sign the waiver and left.
I read through the voucher certificates given to us. There were MANY restrictions on claiming both the plane tickets and the rental car which the telemarketers had not told us about, which effectively made the certificates useless to us. I researched the issuer of the rental car certificate, VIP Travel in Florida. Apparently, it has a history of refusing to redeem the certificates if all of the previously-​undisclosed requirements, right down to the need to conduct correspondence by certified mail within a very short turnaround time, are not scrupulously followed. Separate «deposits» for each of the plane tickets and the rental car were also required. You can see where this is going…
I called the telemarketers again. Kay assured me, for example, that she had not been instructed to include a disclosure of the $ 75 advance deposit to claim the rental car in her pitch to us prior to the time of our initial call, and seemed geuninely apologetic about the additional, previously-​undisclosed restrictions imposed by VIP Travel. She seemed stunned when I told her that the travel office tried to get us to disavow the content of her previous sales call with us. She said she would report these discrepancies to her manager.
The manager (Tom) called me two days later. He tried to rationalize the various discrepancies and saw nothing wrong with the travel office’s attempt to get us to disavow the representations made to us by his telemarketing firm. The owner of the telemarketing firm was equally adamant that both his business and the travel office had not participated in a deception or otherwise done anything wrong. One of the things he made sure to mention was that, because they were in Arizona, they could freely tape our calls without authorization from the remote party. Is this the kind of operation you want to do business with?
To this moment, I cannot understand why ALL of the restrictions could not have been read to all of us unsuspectingly pitched — except, of course, that, if they had, not many would participate in their promotion.
Times are tough enough without having to worry about businesses which talk a good game but do not deliver as promised. Don’t part with your hard-​earned money or free time: wherever you might live, stay away from Perfekt Marketing in Arizona, Pulaski/​Hallmark Travel in California, and VIP Travel in Florida.

Pulaski Tickets and Tours is using Hallmark Travel to engage in deceptive advertizing. They bait consumers by intentionally trying to mislead consumers into thinking that they have been awarded a trip by the Accounting Department. They say that you claim your trip by a «simple call» but actually there is a sales meeting, you have to be married, and there are other restrictions. If they don’t show respect to consumers, then beware!