A Spanish school that ripped off students, and never paid the agency thatb sent them! We are an agency, and exactly like all other agents, we represent schools/Universities. Our Study Spanish and Surf programs had been (and still is) extremely popular. We were looking for a school in a more undeveloped Spanish speaking country, and found via the internet SalvaSpan schools. I contacted the schools (Brian Oelberg replied) and asked for information and references specifically for their Spanish and Surfing program. This was approx May. After a few emails, and checking the couple of references provided by Brian Oelberg, we accepted the school (like our others) on a 6 month trial
As you can see, SalvaSpan AGREEDED to this as per his page We are always hungry for students, so we agreed to consider some sort of commission. As per normal we asked for information and photos, and was directly to their web page. Once the info is up on our web page, we always ask our schools to check the info which Brian would have done. This is standard practise both for us, and every other agency I know! There wasn't any problems or comments.
Please note that I deal with programs/schools, other staff deal with student inquires/bookings
From approx June to Feb we promoted this program, and took 6 bookings to start from Feb onwards. (we still have the bookings originals from the clients).
From about December onwards we started to have major problems in relationship to SalvaSpan.in particular, they (Brian) just did not answer emails regularly. At one stage we had several clients booked to go, and could not get any confirmation, or any response to emails.in fact I personally made quite a number (I would say about 5-6) phones calls to the number provided, left messages (yet no one responded) at first asking and then pleading for replies as we had students dependant on them.
During this approx 4 weeks, as we were getting worried, we also did more intensive background checks and came up with several disturbing indications. As a surfer, we monitor several web pages for info/trends.
At this time there was a very active forum relating to the problem with drugs, needles on the beach and also armed robberies at the location ie La Libertad.
(NB this forum has moved on, but when I checked today there was STILL a different forum topic relating to safety there
Between a very unreliable school, and also adverse comments on the safety of the area, we decided we were left with no alternative but to pull the pug at least for the time being. To explain our decision we decided NOT to mention the actual school and its unreliability, but instead to focus on the unsafe nature of the area so we changed our web page to "Important notice: We are not currently recommending students travel to La Libertad to Study Spanish and surf due to safety concerns. Please look at the other location options, especially Panama"
Nothing happened, and we didn't hear anything back from Brian Oelberg until several months later (I cant remember exactly maybe 3-4 months? Probably when he first became aware of the change on our page) and we got a very abusive email from him, threatening many things.
Jacqui actually responded (very nicely I thought!) explaining why it had occurred, and also explaining that we were still owned commission on the 6 students bookings that had being made as several had decided to go in any case (as flights were booked etc!). I personally thought we should just let it go but Jacqui was justifiably upset at the amount of time and effort she had put in, and the inconvenience for both students and us.
We heard nothing back from Brian Oelberg. We have in fact sent several emails again never to be responded to. He posted his web page shortly AFTER that
From his web page you will also note that he wrote refused to pay them a commission for students who contacted us directly Its very strange for an agency to have names and enrolment forms for students that apparently contact him and not us!
During this period we have found a few other factors which perhaps don't point too favourably at their school.
If you look at me (I am sure you are aware of them)
You will see a review of their school at La Libertad ie
Escuela Punta Roca
The student feedback is When I try to contact them, their email is usually out of service! And gives them a very poor rating.
More interesting is the comment below HOW DO I GET IN which gives them a fantastic rating! Yet the comments indicate that the person hasn't even been! So why would they give it a near perfect rating? I would quietly suggest that this rating is actually by Brian or someone else connected with the school!
You will notice that they have know also changed the name of this school to El Sunzal, after the bad comments. A coincidence?
My personal thought on the whole matter, is that Brian Oelberg became upset when we decided to no longer represent him, and more importantly over the comments that we believed this area of El Savador to be potentially unsafe. And decided to cover himself by constructing this web page. If people ask if La libertad is unsafe he can just deflect and blame me personally as a rip off for the reason.
I was very upset when I first read it, and was considering legal action, or even putting on our web page our side of what happened. However, I have decided that we don't want to have a negative web site (like some agents have for a few bad schools) and go tic for tat. Since his web page only has one link (from his own website), I had hoped that it would just die a natural death. Your's is the first feedback we have
had, so I am interested in how you found it?
I must admit my only fightback was to leave our web page as it is, and not withdraw it, and links to it, as we would normally have done if we dropped a school. I don't think its in the best interest of potential students to go to his schools.
Relating to our integrity, we deal with a good number of language schools, Universities and students.in three years we have only had to drop one other school that we didn't think made the grade. Our feedback (except Brain) has always been very good.
A very good indication of this is the fact Worlds best Language Schools won the international LTM award for worldwide best new agency (3 years and less) in 2006. This award is voted on directly by Language Schools and Universities. The industry obviously felt we were very good to win the award it a pity that Brain and his school didn't produce so we could have supported them to the same degree for professionalism that we do our other schools/universities.
Warwick w
Limerick
Ireland
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