I give the captain and first mate 5 stars because they made our experience parasailing awesome! They were informative, friendly, and made the experience really fun.
The people working the booth, however, were NOT informative and made that part of the experience really annoying. Their lack of communication was ridiculous. First of all, I found Xtreme Parasail on Yelp and after reading most of their 5 star reviews, I figured it was a great place. It didn't go as smoothly as expected. My boyfriend called Xtreme Parasail to ask the cost of the tandem Parasail and Jet Ski and the guy quoted $120 so we booked it for 2pm that day. My bf also asked if they had their own parking lot and how much parking would be. The guy said there was a parking lot where we could park for 4 hours.
We got to the place half an hour early to check in as instructed. Paid for 4 hours of parking since the guy said 4 hours. When signing the waiver, the girl said it was going to be double what the guy quoted my boyfriend over the phone. The total came out to $240 something. (Maybe we should've figured it was $120 PER PERSON, but shouldn't the guy over the phone have said that? We can't just assume that was what he meant.) Surprised at the cost, I asked the girl if we could cancel and the girl said we could cancel our booking but we couldn't get our money back. LOL. False advertisement much? So whatever, we already drove 30 minutes from where we were staying so obviously we paid DOUBLE the amount we were quoted over the phone because we didn't want to lose that money. Then, we were instructed to sit in the waiting area where a white van would pick us up.
We weren't told a time, a name of a person, or anything. So after waiting in the seating area for about 45 minutes, finally a guy comes in a white van parked off to the side and people started going up to him and getting in the van. Had we not seen the people giving the man the same small white paper we had, we wouldn't have known that he was the guy we were supposed to go with because nobody told us anything or called out names or announced anything. There were so many white vans around that area, it could've been anyone. Such a lack of communication. The driver was super cool though and the Jet Ski experience was great as well.
But when we got back to the booth to wait for our turn to parasail, we sat there. Again for over 45 minutes. It had already passed 4pm which was our scheduled time to parasail. Nobody said anything to us so everyone was just sitting there lost and confused. I overheard a guy asking the people in the booth why it was taking so long, and the girl said they had to change the parasail so it was taking longer as expected. Granted, I could have asked that question myself but shouldn't they have informed the 11 people seated and waiting for their scheduled booking at 4pm? Had we not known it was going to be delayed, we would have also gotten cited for parking because we only paid the 4 hours, since AGAIN they didn't inform us of the delay. And we came back an hour later than expected.
Maybe I expect too much from people. But if I'm paying $240 to these people, the least they could do is keep us in the loop and simply tell us what is going on. Had they done that, I would've been perfectly fine and not upset and I would be giving them 5 stars. That's just bad business. read more