'Hotel Club' telemarketing calls

Earlier in the day I was interrupted by a telemarketing call on my mobile by a phone call from someone claiming to represent someone called "Hotel Club in Sydney" who wanted to offer me a "free night, based on my previous hotel stays". I thought this sounded like a familiar script used by time-share scam calls when I lived in the US, so I asked them where they got my number and they gave the same answer that they did in the US as well, "... it was either the Hilton, the Crowne Plaza or the Marriott".

I am usually a tolerant and easy-going sort of person, but getting a telemarketing call on my freaking mobile in the middle of the day while engrossed in doing something important pushed me over the edge and I gave the telemarketer some unsolicited advice. Oddly enough, after I hung up on her, she called me back (twice!) to abuse me right back, which is an unusual escalation in the war between telemarketers and... humans.

Anyway, what I actually want to ask is this:

a) Has anyone else got telemarketing calls from this "Hotel Club" mob?

b) Are they actually associated with hotelclub.com which appears to be owned by orbitz?

c) Did they actually get my mobile number from Hilton and/or Starwood, and if so which one, so I can quit giving my business to hotels which think it's okay to sell my details to telemarketers?

Perhaps you should register your mobile number on the Do Not Call registry as opposed to abusing telemarketers for just doing their job.

She doing dirty job and she does know it, therefore in my books she deserves to be given "unsolicited advise". If all of us would give to telemarketers nothing, but unsolicited advises they stop doing it immediately.

I also have one lovely Indian block called me second time to say something rude in return. I indeed p!ssed him and ruin his day. Thus I made my own day. LOL.

if what you where doing was SO important, why did you answer a call from a number that  either wasnt 'showing' or was not recogized by you?, and just let it go to voicemail/sms..OR even turn your fone off!!!...If ANY caller REALLY wanted to contact you, they would leave a message, so after you finished your 'something important', ring them back...or don't...simple solution really

and even if you just HAD to answer the fone (in the middle of your 'something important'), a simple.."not interested" would have sufficed

I also suggest you resgister on Do Not Call

It's your fone...it's amazing how much power YOU can have over IT...rather than vice versa

If you really wanna know, I was involved in a Skype video call on my phone, and apparently Skype is set up to automatically drop the call you're in when actual phone calls come through the old-school phone system.

I made a complaint to the do not call registry, who said that they had no record of me being on it (odd, I thought I signed up ages ago) but they said it would be "forwarded to the ACMA due to possible breach of the Telemarketing and Research Calls Industry Standard 2007 (TRCIS)." 

I doubt it'll do much good, but it's something.

Forget the DNC register. Most of these scammers are o/s and ACMA has zero chance of finding and/or prosecuting them. I'd say they've hacked a DB from one of the hotel groups and are diligently calling it. 

And to UTR's point - its your phone, use the power wisely...

Hugo, have you tried trolling?

I did and did so with great success. But it requires time and often time is far more important than self-satisfaction. Also it will change nothing - they often way too stupid to even understand that they being trolled. Unsolicited advice IMHO working better.

In the old days when I had a landline, I would sometimes say "Oh, can you just hold on a minute?" and then leave them hanging on for arbitrary lengths of time. 

Not such a good option on my mobile, on which I was trying to accomplish something else at the time.