Buyer beware - do NOT pre-pay for a massage with Melissa Mower at An Artist's Touch. What is…read moreunfortunate is that she is actually a pretty good massage therapist, that is, if you can get her to honor her commitments. However, I bought three Groupons from her in the past, & it was always extraordinarily difficult to schedule an appointment to redeem the Groupons. At first I wrote this off because I figured she was a one-woman show and got overwhelmed with the response. However, it's one thing to be overwhelmed initially, and it's another thing to never realize this is a problem that must be fixed if you're going to run a reliable business - especially when you continue to offer new Groupons.
After a good massage from the last Groupon I bought, I made the huge mistake of buying gift certificates for massages at Christmas-time in 2011. Then began the months-long ordeal of trying to get these redeemed. One of my gift-recipients scheduled massages FOUR times, only to be stood up for all of her appointments. After months and months of calls and text messages, long delays in response, cancellations, etc, I got her to honor two of the gift certificates, even though she had only put a two-month validity date on them (which is already a fairly bad business practice). One of them literally took until the following August to schedule successfully.
Two other friends (one of whom also wrote a review here) have purchased massages or received gift certificates for them and have had similar problems, only they didn't even have any success redeeming their massages. I had to to border on harassment and ask for my money back a couple times to get her to redeem mine, and obviously, most people would probably just give up. Makes you wonder if it's a good strategy on her part, to sell something and then just make it really, really hard to redeem it. I truly don't know if Melissa is running a scam, or if she's just a really flaky business-woman, but she seriously needs to improve her business practices and integrity.
After practically forcing her to honor a gift certificate last August, she offered to give me a good deal on my future massages, presumably to stop me from writing negative reviews, but it was too little, too late. I will not return. I saw a new Groupon being offered today, which is what spurred me to write this review now.