Indaba Yoga rip-off
I went yesterday afternoon to my very first class at Marylebone. I arrived 17 minutes late due to RMT strike action on Central Line.
(1) I was required to pay a £20 supplement due to lateness as a condition of joining my class. (For which £35 had already been paid: a one-hour introductory class.)
(2) I was told that I could not take into the studio my small 12-inch shoulder bag and that I would have to put it into a locker.
(3) I was told that I needed a £1 coin for the locker. They had no machine for giving change, nor could they open the till without some further purchase (which seems to me almost certainly false).
(4) I took into the studio what I could from my bag, viz mobile & bank card, and left the rest outside.
(5) When I finished my session, I found the bag had been emptied of a camera grip to the value of £43 and Sennheiser headphones to the value of £30.
(6) I reported the theft at reception. I was told that a man with ‘black hair’ and a ‘red shirt’ had walked in and gone directly past the desk.
(7) In ‘compensation’, I was offered four 1-hour classes at reduced rates, but these were not the power-yoga class that I had signed up for, and they were at times that nobody else wants, hence the vacancies.
I think this is pretty poor: penalizing people for what they have already lost, viz. part of their lesson, failing to instal functional lockers in days when few now carry coins, and allowing people to walk in off the streets and access areas outsider the studio where customers have had to leave possessions.
To make things worse: What is posted here below on Trust Pilot is not the email that I received from the manager, but a rewrite. The original email response from the manager was unapologetic and dismissive: I was simply told to report the case to the police, but since the theft occurred on their premises, it was their responsibility to do this. The manager also alleged discrepancy in my reporting of events, i.e. with the implication that I had confabulated, and NOT discrepancy with what the staff recollected. Whatever their 'policy' on admitting people, it was not what they actually DID on this occasion.
30 May 2022
Unprompted review