I posted this approximately 7 years ago elsewhere, and apparently it's still valid:

We owned this timeshare since 1997 and it's time to move on. This is room 503, a one bedroom (sleeps four), week 49 at The Atrium Resort in Simpson Bay. It is an oceanfront room on the fifth floor.

Unfortunately, a company called Festiva Resorts bought The Atrium in October, 2005 and the resort has (coincidentally?) been bleeding red ink since. Their management team (headed by two schmucks named Don Clayton & Butch Patrick) is trying to sway the courts of St. Maarten to void our boilerplate contract to allow for a special assessment in the amount of approximately $1200.00....and at the same time opening the door to future assessments of the same type. Also, they continually try to cajole us into paying maintenance fees in excess of what's allowed by the contract. They also want the contractually-mandated cap on the maintenance fees removed. (Update to this scenario is below).

Festiva will provide you with an occasional financial statement regarding the resort with more conflicting figures than you can imagine. The report is so hard to figure out that I have trouble figuring out which way to hold it to read it.

Up until 2005 this had been a wonderful place, very clean (it still is), centrally located and with an attentive, friendly staff including the manager, a nice woman, who was put in place by Festiva for her pro-company stance replacing the previous manager who was let go for showing sympathy toward the (possible) impending plight of the timeshare owners.

Being a business owner for over 33 years I am qualified to say that this Festiva outfit is one of the shadiest companies I've ever done business with. They were found guilty (by the attorney general) in Branson, MO. for deceitful business practices and fined $339,393.00 in 2005. You can find literally hundreds of unhappy Festiva owners with a simple Google search who have been scammed, cheated and lied to and at many of their resorts.

If you'd like to vacation on an island that allows an inept/crooked island judge to tear up your valid timeshare contract to favor the resort owners AND you'd like to ride this financial bucking bronco at one of the nicest resorts on the island, this is the one for you.

Update: Festiva somehow convinced the judge to void my legal contract to allow a special assessment (in my case) of 1200.00, which smacks of corruption on the part of the judge, Festiva or both. Not only that, I received a bill for approximately 2300.00 total, charging me the aforementioned 1200.00 plus interest and penalties resulting from a past due maintenance fee shortage, which was also not owed under my legal contract. I won't be paying that, even though I've been threatened by them to do so.

I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones; I owned at The Atrium long enough, and used my unit enough times that when the smoked cleared my annual usage fee was still below the rack rate.

My recommendation is that any prospective timeshare buyer should avoid this company like the plague.

Addendum: I received threatening calls (repeatedly) from a collection agency saying that if I didn't pay it would be reported to the major credit bureaus. I'm not a lawyer, but I couldn't see how a foreign-based transaction could impact my credit rating, and I was right. My current score is 818.

At any rate, I've since been renting a house annually in the Oyster Pond area. I am very happy to not have anything to do with Festiva or the island's apparently crooked legal system.