Resort Vacation Certificate
Advisory
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The Government Employee Travel Opportunities (G.E.T.O.) program was created to provide leisure travel discounts to Government employees as a specific benefit of their employment. Offering Government employees a special, low "Space-A" condominium rental rate is a way of expressing our appreciation for your service to the American public. The "Space-A" rate is intended to make vacations affordable for DoD employees because tax dollars don’t provide for large salaries. We do not make G.E.T.O. or the "Space-A" rental program available to the general public. G.E.T.O. was not designed to provide a second income opportunity. Both the "Terms of Use" and "Policies and Procedures" pages clearly state that units reserved through the G.E.T.O. may not be brokered, bartered, sold or rented to a third party and that the web site is solely for your personal, non-commercial use. We suspected there might be people who would ignore this restriction or feel that it does not apply to them and implemented various methods to monitor for such activity. You may not resell or rent units reserved through this program. When we uncover violations of this provision, permission to use this Web Site may be terminated immediately, permanently and without notice. Unfortunately, we have uncovered several violators this year and we will continue to watch for more. Guest Certificates and Resort Vacation Certificates were added to the program so that you could share this benefit with family and close friends by giving them a certificate. We deliberately did not establish a predetermined limit for certificates. How could we expect you to select just 2 or 3 of 5 brothers and sisters to give a certificate? Your parents or your spouse’s? We thought we could rely on people to use exercise discretion and follow the intent that the program be a benefit for government employees. Unfortunately, this has not proven to be true in all cases. It may be true that there were 450 people at your family reunion and that you are friends with all of your neighbors in a 120-house subdivision. But when you start doing a volume business in certificates, particularly with other people’s money, you exceed the scope of the program. Even if you are not collecting more than the exact cost of the certificate, it is considered an abuse of the process. At this point, we will not set limits on certificates for everyone, but will address the issue on a case-by-case basis. If, in our opinion, the purchase of either or both Guest and Resort Vacation Certificates is of such quantity or frequency as to constitute an abuse of the program, we reserve the right to establish limits on individual accounts or to terminate the right to purchase certificates. We regret that these measures have to be implemented, however, they are necessary to maintain the integrity of the G.E.T.O. as a true benefit of Government employment. Sharleen Hoehler |
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