UNFAIR REVIEW

Hello Ivy,

Thank you for taking time to leave us a review in FB. We’re honestly a bit heartbroken to read this—not because of the service we provided, but because it seems our 100% recommendation status we painstakingly worked on since 2019 just met its match in the form of a Toyota Vios Sedan.

We are truly sorry for what happened to your car. However, we’re struggling to see how your vehicle’s off-roading capabilities (or lack thereof) reflect on the actual experience of gliding through the air. It’s a bit like giving a five-star restaurant a one-star review because you got a flat tire in the parking lot.

To clarify a few points:

  • The Instructions: During the booking process, we provide you links to road conditions on our Website, the Skyridge webpage, and both our Facebook pages. We also send it through the Group Chat. We explicitly advise that the 1 km stretch from the parking lot to the flysite requires a 4×4 or SUV.
  • The Assumption: When you told us “we have transpo naman,” we took your word for it! We assumed you’d read the brief and were confident in your vehicle’s spirit.
  • The Rescue: Despite this being a “road/driving error” and not a “flying error,” our team—including Yana—went completely above and beyond. She sent crew members to help you and even fixed your flat tire for you. For the record, we do provide FREE pick up and transport for people, who after reading about the road conditions, say “Please pick us up”.

In the spirit of “providing all the facts,” here is the link to the pre-flight info we shared and the same information we spent quite a bit of time recap-ing in our chats—we’re always happy to answer questions, even when the answers are already in the link.

Evidences that all our passengers are informed of the road conditions and what kind of vehicles to bring:

I. THRU THE GROUP CHAT

All our passengers receive the same information as you did.

II. THRU THE WEBSITE LINK THAT WE SEND BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER BOOKING

Road conditions and heads-up has been given in the “BEFORE FLYING” link that we send all our passengers.

All of your other questions in the group chat has been answered thru this page. But clearly, it wasn’t read.

Before Flying

The information is found in these sections:

III. THRU THE SKYRIDGE PAGE

On the instruction link, another button leads you to the fly site information page. This has been posted since our re-opening on April 1. It has also been posted in SKYRIDGE AMBAGUIO’s FB page.

I don’t want to start a fight about this but I feel like the review is unfair because of the following reasons:

  1. Our main service is the paragliding flight itself. I will understand the “DOES NOT RECOMMEND” review if we provided you with an unsafe and very bad flight experience.
  2. I also understand that as a company, we should provide a good end-to-end experience (including all services). Please understand that Paragliding in Ambaguio is a tribal and mountain tourism COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT project. This means, we are partnering with different local entities for all our different services, to help build Ambaguio as a tourism destination. Many of our supplementary services are provided by others. The flysite (Skyridge) is a different service provider from the flight provider (NV Paragliding). The best we can do is give the heads-up on the road condition, which we already did.
  3. It’s disappointing that after our open communication and efforts to help you on the day, you chose to post this review online. A little bit of understanding would have been nice – at least tell us all your complaints thru the chat as we had been very open and patient in answering your questions as well.
  4. Since April, we do provide FREE pick up and transport for people who, after reading thru our links, request for pick up.
  5. Singling out Yana, one of our best performing crew, is especially tough to swallow. She was so worried about your car that she was practically holding a vigil for your transport, while you were flying up in the air. She is a volunteer hero, and it’s a shame to see her efforts met with a public “not recommended” tag.
  6. Since we re-opened operations, no one or no group has ever complained about not knowing the road conditions because we do inform everyone about it. You’re the first who managed to overlook our road warnings. We’ll certainly try to make the instructions even more “un-ignorable”, but it’s a bit of a gut punch to receive a “not recommended” review for a mechanical drama we didn’t cause, but did help fix.

I am not here to fight nor to invalidate your experience. I am writing this to give an explanation because I feel like your review is a bit unfair.

We feel sad that you’re the first group to post a NON RECOMMENDATION for us. Rest assured, we will continue to do our best in flying our passengers safely and giving them memorable experiences.

We’re glad the staff was “friendly and lively,” and we’re glad you got home safely.

You can reach out to me thru my FB page: https://www.facebook.com/violetparagliding