spuds

No, and I submitted the forum fairly early on and never got a phone call.

Tom, yes we are in complete agreement - on all points of your post, including reviewing (and keeping a watchful eye) whether FMCA membership provides us any continued value. As with you, coming to the message board to review the Verizon data fiasco has also caused me to read over the many posts about allowing membership to owners of towables and contribute my thoughts to that thread. So there's that - FMCA gets a momentary bump in their forum participation from those of us peeved about the handling of the Verizon deal ;-) Michelle

I don't follow the logic here. Towable has nothing to do with FMCAssist, and there is no evidence it would "greatly increase the revenue". Towable owners don't appear to be clamoring to join FMCA, rather FMCA officers are pushing the membership to allow towables to join. There is still a huge audience of motorhome owners who aren't members or who have never heard of FMCA. Why aren't more efforts being made to entice them to join? If the club is opened up to allow other RV types, it becomes nothing more than, and will compete directly with, organizations like Good Sam (much cheaper per year and you get Camping World and Flying J discounts) and Escapees (awesome mail service). Does the RV industry really have need for 3 similar clubs, especially if there is nothing to set FMCA apart/better than the others? It would likely dilute the apparent value of the club to motorhome owners who might be likely to join more than 1 club if there were distinct membership benefits, but not 3 if there is no perceived advantage to the third. It would make more sense to focus on making FMCA a more visible club to the motorhome community (and that's not by advertising within their own magazine or giving substantial funds to a single social media enterprise startup).

Bolded for emphasis. Low-priced, unlimited Verizon data would be a HUGE benefit to many, thus we do not have normal circumstances in this case. Surely FMCA understood the desirability of this perk when they arranged to offer it. You wouldn't think they'd go through that effort for something that only a small portion of the membership would want, or which would attract a significant number of new members. Either they expected rabid interest in the program to increase membership sign ups (which they got) or they don't understand what they were offering and what the market for that is. So either very poor judgement, or they knew exactly what they were doing.

Behavior/practices that align more as a for-profit business than a non-profit. As a non-profit (how FMCA "qualified" to offer this from Verizon), an organization's responsibility is to support, and provide value to, the existing membership.

We, too, are longtime FMCA members and find the handling of this program distasteful and FMCA's dismissive responses to our legitimate questions insulting. When long-time existing members cannot take advantage of a benefit yet brand new signups can, something is very wrong. It speaks to a different focus - bringing in money from new memberships rather than looking after the existing base. We submitted the online form, per the instructions, within hours of its announcement, yet never received a call. People solely interested in taking advantage of the data plan but needing a membership simply circumnavigated the process, called to join and get the data plan, and were awarded priority. We are now being denied a club benefit. Do we get our membership cost credited back to us until we are able to share in all the same benefits as these new members?

I'm curious why some of us who followed the instructions and submitted the request online in time for the June allotment have never gotten our calls (and now have to wait at least a month). It sounds like FMCA didn't restrict the first devices to these 5000 existing members who were intended to be the "soft launch", either, nor even to existing members. One would hope a benefit would first be provided to current membership, but that is clearly not what happened. On the surface, it appears more to be used to increase membership, with little concern as to whether the new members actually qualify under the club charter. This is one of the poorest roll outs I've seen and the apparent lack of concern that FMCA is being scammed by folks who don't own RVs joining and taking advantage of the program is disappointing.

Yes, potentially thousands of new members who don't own a motorhome (or any RV, for that matter), as news spread to places like PhoneArena, Howard Forums, etc. FMCA currently has no way to verify the claimed coach ownership (and if you read some of those other sites, people were simply lying on their applications so they could join FMCA and take advantage of the Verizon data plan, and advising others to do the same to scam the system). Just Google FMCA unlimited Internet and you'll see how far this spread.

Exactly the point.

Bill - there are no devices to get for at least another month. You cannot call and get one or even get on a waitlist. The devices/plans were allocated to a once per month shipment. June's are gone (took no more than a day). July's appear to be gone as well since they won't allow any more signups right now. Existing members who followed the proper channels never heard back. Many folks who weren't already FMCA members were able to sign up because they saw this on an unrelated website; most existing FMCA members had no idea of this benefit until they read it on a non-FMCA Facebook page, too late to try and sign up, yet it hadn't even been officially announced to the FMCA membership yet. This is unacceptable.

Looks like it got leaked out within the past couple of day and jumped on by a number of folks who weren't FMCA members and who have since joined (and given the sites it was advertised on, many are not RVers at all). Now there are no more devices available for the wave. So those of us who are long time (well over 10 years) FMCA members never got the official notice and have since missed out, at least on the first batch of devices. This is entirely unfair to the existing membership. I've also read that only 5000 FMCA members were made aware of the new benefit. Would like to know how those 5000 were chosen, especially if there are limited devices/plans available. The whole thing is very disappointing.

We're somewhat familiar with Sandy Shores - it's not a traditional RV park/resort as you're used to. It's a condominium/ownership community. The sites are individually owned. Generally folks stay the season, kind of like snowbirding; a few (like Pete's lots) may be available for monthly sublet rentals. They're not set up for short-term stays (I'm not sure if the condo rules allow it) and there aren't organized activities (that I'm aware of). Almost all adults, very few kids except the occasional visiting grandchild. If you're looking for parks with kids activites, many around Wells/OOB have a great set-up for that. Further north, Skowhegan KOA is very family-friendly as well. Michelle