My family and I skydived (skydove?) at this place on December 23, 2007, and over the next two months, had an absolutely horrible experience related to the jumps.
I want to be totally honest in this review, and to give the operator the benefit of the doubt, will list the positives in advance. The overall reality is that we had a good time that day despite some significant problems, but the problems over the following 8 weeks were extremely irritating due to the awful attitude of the owner.
Now - on to the good about the skydiving day:
1. The price is good for tandem skydiving.
2. The tandem partners were friendly and knowledgeable. The jumpers handled people of different nerve-levels well.
3. We did not schedule videos, but once we arrived, some wanted videos. Though this was going to lengthen the day, the staff worked to get it done.
On to the negatives:
1: the plane we were to jump from arrived over two hours late.
2: the pilot seemed incompetent. One of our jumpers were told to jump over a mile off course so they landed in a field a mile away. The staff acted like this happened all the time with this pilot.
3: They had two tandem kits but they weren't getting a jumper ready while the plane was in the air, which led to a huge amount of down-time between jumps. This speaks to the incompetence of the owner.
Now again - despite those problems, we had a good time, and as of that evening, I would have given this place probably three stars, maybe four.
However, the real problems started soon after regarding the videos. We knew the owner was shutting down for Christmas, so we didn't get concerned when the videos didn't arrive for a couple of weeks. We started to wonder after three, and after four, we decided to call. My sister called four weeks to the day after our jump on a Sunday. The owner answered and when told of the problem, said he'd call the video guy and call my sister back.
We did not receive a call back. On Wednesday, three days after the initial call, my other sister called the owner . There were several witnesses to this call. While my sister did make it be known that this situation had to be resolved, she was not rude. The owner replied that he had made a single call to the video person and had not received a call back. Somehow he felt that this was enough effort and that him letting us know his progress was unnecessary. This is unacceptable answer in my opinion, and my sister let him know she felt the same. He got angry and defensive before the call ended. The following day he called my first sister and left a vicious email complaining about us.
On Friday, I called him and tried to calmly get the situation resolved . He had finally gotten ahold of the videographer and was having the videos remade. He complained that we hadn't called in until four weeks after the jump (frankly I thought it was polite of us to not complain immediately). He refused to estimate when the videos may be completed. He told me that if we wanted further correspondence, it would be via mail or email. I tried calling him back later and emailing to make sure he had the right address but he did not reply to either message.
Several days later, we received two letters which he had sent on consecutive days. It appeared that the first letter was written prior to the angry phone call with my sister, and the second written afterwards. The first was fairly polite in which he essentially admitted they had probably been sent to the wrong address (what kind of a businessman sends $500 worth of merchandise through untrackable US Mail is beyond me). The second letter was vile. I am going to scan the letter in so you can see it, but for now, choice phrases included calling us the "Hitler Youth", "my job is to make you schedule changing little girls happy", and threatened to call the authorities because of our "threats" (to call the Better Business Bureau I guess). He also blamed us for the problem by requesting videos which allegedly caused schedule problems (not that we put a gun to his head and forced him to take our money, and note above the late plane, and the slow turnaround between jumps).
Over the next couple of weeks, he was unresponsive to very civil emails by me. Finally about three weeks later, he emailed me that the videos were ready. Today we picked up the videos. The videos were good, so I give him that. Nonetheless, this was a disgusting experience and I hope noone who reads this review will visit this business. read more
