So I wanted to learn to paraglide. I looked up a bunch of schools, talked to some people, finally picked Cloud 9. Why? Because they seemed to be one of the larger schools, they have a shop, their pitch sounded good.
Big mistake.
What did I get for over a thousand dollars of my hard earned money? I now know how to float off a small bunny hill for a minute and a half and end up down below. Amazing, right? My God, I can drift off a bunny hill!
Their "instruction" is a ploy to get you to buy about $6,000 worth of gear, which also you won't know how to use for anything... Unless you have a bunny hill nearby you want to drift down from.
Their school is at a world class flying site. Any given afternoon I'd see dozens of paragliders soaring above the mountains, looked like great fun. Did I think I'd learn how to do that for a thousand dollars, plus another six thousand in gear? Yup, I did. Silly, silly me. But no though, I don't know how to do that. I know nothing about anything except floating down a bunny hill. Because that's what you get from Cloud 9.
Maybe I'm speaking out of frustration, but the owners of that place are first class dicks, also. Arrogant, quasi friendly only the day off the "oops you need to buy gear now" charade. Did they teach me anything whatsoever? Nope. There were at least five of us on the bunny hill, trying to figure stuff out, and one and a half stressed looking instructors giving us the most basic of input.
80% of the words that entailed this "instructions" were...'left' and 'right'. They put a radio on you and basically remote steer you down the bunny hill. It's sad, seriously. Now I need to go find a real instructor to actually teach me how to fly. This is over seven thousand dollars later.
Don't make my mistake, do your research, talk to the actual INSTRUCTOR you'll be learning from, and get something in writing on what you'll KNOW HOW TO DO and how many people your instructor will be teaching simultaneously.
F*K Cloud 9, seriously.
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