Skydiving Drama

As I mentioned in a previous post, I arranged a skydiving trip for our class. It's something that I wanted to do before starting MBA school but ran out of time. It turned out that we had to do a business case for a skydiving outfit in Gananoque for our Management Accounting class. I thought I'd only get about 10 people to sign up, but ended up with 23 people in total including a couple of professors.

In talking with the owner of Skydive Gananoque, I decided to book the day before Canada Day since he was going to have a Twin Otter plane that could take a group of 6 tandem jumpers at once. I planned it out that 12 people would go in the morning and 11 would go in the afternoon, sandwiching a class that we had that day. Things didn't go according to plan...the pilot for the plane got held up at the border and they had some other issues. We ended up going on the smaller Cessna planes that could only accommodate two tandem jumpers at a time. The morning group took a lot longer than expected while the afternoon group and me ended up waiting around for about 3 hours before the first of us got on a plane. It was a bright sunny day with minimal clouds and they barely squeezed us in before sundown. Our management accounting prof who set up a whole business case for them didn't get to jump. They suited him up and then told him that it was too dark to go. Not very nice. A little communication on the part of the owner to let me know what was happening would have been good just to manage expectations a little bit. We could have figured out a way to make it work out for people.

It wasn't an entirely negative experience though. The jump itself was euphoric. I laughed myself to sleep that night. It's too bad it got marred by bad customer service.

Here are some pictures and videos:





I think this one of Kwesi is the best though...


Here's the video I paid $100 for...maybe I'm losing my sense of humour, but I didn't appreciate what the tandem instructor was doing during the free fall.



Here's one of the videos that we took on the ground. You can see how dark it was at the time. Kwesi took this one for me...you can hear what they said about Clinton (the prof) not jumping in the end.



Clinton decided to take his money back and go jump somewhere else.

You can have a look at the rest of the pictures here.

At the end of the experience I was a little upset by the customer service we received. One of my former colleagues asked me about and I replied to him in a bad way. Word got around to the owner of Skydive Gananoque, Tom, and a few nasty emails got exchanged. Here's how it went:

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I removed the email thread after some advice from people. Probably not the best thing to do.

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I know I'm no angel in this, but I think Tom was over the top. Personally, I think he had a really bad weekend on Canada Day where things didn't go very well and my comments just gave him an outlet to take out his frustrations. As much as he dislikes me, he still has my picture on his website. It was a good lesson on how not to do customer service in any case.

I'll have some recommendations for next year's MBA class if they want to go skydiving. Tom's outfit is close to Kingston, but he probably has a grudge against MBA students now...thanks to me. Next year's class may be better off going to Ottawa for the day...that's a 2 hour drive to get there but they might get better service.