Outside the 5-day window
Fight back
Past the cooling-off period, the law won't save you — PROFECO is largely toothless. But every one of these resorts is a business. In the end they do whatever is best for their business. Your job is to make refunding you cheaper than fighting you.
Make it a business decision
Fighting back takes less effort than you'd think. The whole concept centers on one fact: these companies will eventually do whatever is in the best interest of their business. So you hit them where it hurts — their future business. Your goal: cost the company at least 50 times the value of your contract, or $1,000,000 in lost future business. The most successful approach combines the press, government pressure, and a website. If you doubt it's possible — with just this one website, the resort that scammed me has paid out over $1,000,000 in refunds to other victims.
Since this is a business decision for them, the company weighs its options: ignore you and eat the losses, pay a lawyer to come after you, or refund you. Your job is to (1) make them believe you'll easily cost them ten times the value of your contract, and (2) protect your identity so a lawyer can't intimidate you — leaving a refund as their only sensible option.
Put up a competing website
The single most effective tool is a critical website that competes with the resort for their own customers' attention — warning future buyers away from their presentations. One group did exactly this, obtained domains close to their resort's name, and put enough pressure on Mayan Palace to settle for refunds of around 90% — including for people who'd purchased up to two years earlier. Time doesn't matter; what matters is how badly you can hurt the company's future business.
Using an email address tied to your own domain (rather than your personal one) also helps shield your identity from a lawyer's attack while constantly reminding the resort they're losing business every day your site is up. When you negotiate, don't go soft — get the refund in hand before you take the site down. You can even make handing over the domain part of the deal.
Note on the original 2008 how-to
Pressure government officials
Alongside a website, start an aggressive email campaign. The more people who contact their senators, congressmen, prime ministers (for our Canadian readers), and every Mexican government official, the sooner these presentations end. Whenever you write an official, copy the resort on the email. Whether or not the official ever acts, the resort knowing you're making the effort worries them — and that's leverage. See the government email list on the Resources page (verify the addresses first — many are old).
Go to the press
There's always room in the press for a good consumer-fraud story. Several people who fought back got their stories onto local and regional TV; don't forget local newspapers and radio. As they say, any publicity is good publicity — and a story about tourists being mistreated in Mexico tends to get interest. As with the government emails: whenever you contact a news outlet, copy your resort so they know you're doing it.
Reviews & tourist warnings
Your right to free speech is one of your best weapons. Post your experience everywhere tourists look: timeshare-exchange review sites (like RCI), travel forums, and tourist horror-story boards. Even a review filed under the resort where you stayed still warns people away from the resort whose presentation burned you. Get onto the internet and report what happened to you.
Team up with other victims
Search the forums and boards and you'll easily find other victims of your resort. Banding together distributes the work and raises the stakes: a few people might cost the company $100k, but a group of 20–40 could represent a $1,000,000 payoff the company can never fully refund — which is precisely why an organized group is so much harder for them to ignore.
The easy way
Often, the threat of all this is enough. Some people have negotiated favorably just by warning the resort they're about to go through this whole process. If you're inclined, email the resort a link to this page and tell them you're serious. But know that if you make the threat, you have to be willing to follow through — and you give up some ability to protect your identity. As long as you only ever tell the truth, an actual lawsuit is unlikely; but if the legal-threat letter would rattle you, work hard to keep your identity protected.
Best of all: cancel in time