WARNING…!!!!!!!! I had put this whole experience behind me until Neville brought it to mind again recently by looking for positive feedback from all of us on that November course. I thought it was a complete waste of my time and money. Mila was great and did his job well. I did,nt quite get it and because there where 20 in the class, did not want to bother him as he had enough to do it seemed. Had there been a maximum of 14, then perhaps i could have asked for a little extra help from him. I did not like the large class and felt quite intimidated and embarrassed to ask for help and even if I had, would he have had the time to give me.? What Howard Black wrote is spot on and I cannot disagree with any of it. I didn’t get to see the cramped, expensive accommodation that was dangled as a carrot to get us there and by all accounts, am glad I didn’t. (The pictures he posted looked nice). From the outset, and even before I arrived in Prague, I felt like Neville was scamming us. He offered this cheap accommodation and once he had my deposit, told me that it was full. I researched accommodation prices and found them to be a lot more than he was offering. I asked him for help and suggested I might not be able to afford the course if I had to pay so much, that the whole thing was based on “the cheap accommodation” he had offered. (Dangled). We ended up, thanks to Bob, finding a great appartement but at 3x the price. Thanks Bob. To my surprise, Neville came back to me saying that someone had moved course and that a small room had become available and if I sent another deposit, he would secure it for me. I sent another lump of money and low and behold, guess what, he thanked me for it and said that someone had got there before me. Do not get sucked in by promisses of cheap accommodation. Others, who were in the accommodation offered have written about that. When I suggested I might not be able to do the course for financial reasons, so giving him the opportunity to reduce the numbers OVERBOOKED on the course, instead of accepting that and letting me cancel it, his simple reply was,…” It would be a shame for you to cancel, especially as both your deposits are non-refundable”…and he gave me a link to a site that would definitely be able to help me. There are, of course, loads of sites that will help you, at a price. Who says our deposits are non refundable and why can,t they be? Particularly when he has made that guarantee of promising a maximum of 14 pupils several times on his website, and is overbooked. The course fee was $1990 but of course if we paid within 3 days, we would “make a whopping saving of 291USD”. I think a few fell for that one and took advantage of it. Then the remainder was to be paid “in full, in CASH” before the course started. Whenever anyone asks me for ‘cash’, my first thoughts are, this sounds a bit dodgy. 20 people paying this amount….Quite a lot by my calculations. I wonder if there is an element of greed involved here. When we went to look for it, the office he referred to did not exist, ‘right in the heart of Prague’. So another lie. I could go on but enough said.. Others have their comments to make. Some appear to be good. This is my opinion only. Shame, on the surface it looked good but BE WARNED..!!!!!! Don,t make the same mistake. Don,t get sucked in by lies and false promisses. LOOK ELSEWHERE...!!!!!!
Sunday 1 July 2012
ITTP TEFL Reviews Two
WARNING…!!!!!!!! I had put this whole experience behind me until Neville brought it to mind again recently by looking for positive feedback from all of us on that November course. I thought it was a complete waste of my time and money. Mila was great and did his job well. I did,nt quite get it and because there where 20 in the class, did not want to bother him as he had enough to do it seemed. Had there been a maximum of 14, then perhaps i could have asked for a little extra help from him. I did not like the large class and felt quite intimidated and embarrassed to ask for help and even if I had, would he have had the time to give me.? What Howard Black wrote is spot on and I cannot disagree with any of it. I didn’t get to see the cramped, expensive accommodation that was dangled as a carrot to get us there and by all accounts, am glad I didn’t. (The pictures he posted looked nice). From the outset, and even before I arrived in Prague, I felt like Neville was scamming us. He offered this cheap accommodation and once he had my deposit, told me that it was full. I researched accommodation prices and found them to be a lot more than he was offering. I asked him for help and suggested I might not be able to afford the course if I had to pay so much, that the whole thing was based on “the cheap accommodation” he had offered. (Dangled). We ended up, thanks to Bob, finding a great appartement but at 3x the price. Thanks Bob. To my surprise, Neville came back to me saying that someone had moved course and that a small room had become available and if I sent another deposit, he would secure it for me. I sent another lump of money and low and behold, guess what, he thanked me for it and said that someone had got there before me. Do not get sucked in by promisses of cheap accommodation. Others, who were in the accommodation offered have written about that. When I suggested I might not be able to do the course for financial reasons, so giving him the opportunity to reduce the numbers OVERBOOKED on the course, instead of accepting that and letting me cancel it, his simple reply was,…” It would be a shame for you to cancel, especially as both your deposits are non-refundable”…and he gave me a link to a site that would definitely be able to help me. There are, of course, loads of sites that will help you, at a price. Who says our deposits are non refundable and why can,t they be? Particularly when he has made that guarantee of promising a maximum of 14 pupils several times on his website, and is overbooked. The course fee was $1990 but of course if we paid within 3 days, we would “make a whopping saving of 291USD”. I think a few fell for that one and took advantage of it. Then the remainder was to be paid “in full, in CASH” before the course started. Whenever anyone asks me for ‘cash’, my first thoughts are, this sounds a bit dodgy. 20 people paying this amount….Quite a lot by my calculations. I wonder if there is an element of greed involved here. When we went to look for it, the office he referred to did not exist, ‘right in the heart of Prague’. So another lie. I could go on but enough said.. Others have their comments to make. Some appear to be good. This is my opinion only. Shame, on the surface it looked good but BE WARNED..!!!!!! Don,t make the same mistake. Don,t get sucked in by lies and false promisses. LOOK ELSEWHERE...!!!!!!
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Ok, anyone considering taking the comments of HBlendon seriously, please please read this first.
ReplyDeleteHBlendon wrote:
'I am a former ITTP TEFL Prague student and I am writing this complaints to provide a place where people can review ITTP TEFL Prague without fear of their reviews being removed. It is also to alert other potential TEFL clients to a major review scam currently being run by Neville Thomas and ITTP TEFL Prague. What his company did to myself and my classmates was really poor, however that is not my problem now. My problem is his attitude and dirty games towards our complaints and subsequent online reviews which has made me really angry. '
That's not really true, is it HBlendon. Yes, ITTP has attracted some negative reviews, but no more than any other onsite or online TEFL course. Spend a bit of time looking and you'll see that all well-known onsite and online courses attract a fair balance of positive and negative reviews. That's normal.
What's not normal though is this:
Since about April 23 of last year we see a flood of extremely similar forum posts and reviews. All of them have similar titles, similar content, have something to do with a supposed scam ITTP Prague, or ramblings on about lousy accommodation at ITTP Prague. Whole "blogs" have even been created with the sole intention of writing one post - a negative review about ITTP.
All this since April 23.
Anyone with half a brain can see that all of these forum posts / reviews / one-post blogs were created by the same person or small group of people with some personal issue against ITTP or someone who works for them - clearly Neville, the joint owner of ITTP and widely respected in the Prague Education community as far as I and my colleagues are aware. Oh, and unlike you I have lived in Prague for 13 years so I think I can write with a bit more unbiased clarity ;)
Just look at the language used in the posts - there's not even any attempt to use different writing styles to make it look like they were written by different people. Have a look at the comments in the review that HBlendon quotes on his blog, for example - the language is so unbelievably unnatural for a genuine reply to a forum thread, it's laughable - they are such obviously staged replies, written by the same person that wrote the original post.
HBlendon (or whatever the person's real name is) quite obviously has some personal issue with ITTP and has decided to devote a large amount of time and energy into trying to discredit them.
My advice to anyone reading this - treat anything negative you read about ITTP written on or after April 23 with a very large pinch of salt.
P.S. No, before you ask, HBlendon, I don't work for ITTP.
Firstly i don't work for ittp.
ReplyDeletei can see these blog posts began in around april of last year so if i did work for ittp why wait until now to respond like this. i just want to get that out of the way.
i DO though study on the ittp online course and began doing so on friday last week and i came across this "blog" researching my online course options and i must write that pages like this one actually clinched the deal for me because i was sure that the posts were written by either 1 person or a few and the amount of energy spent on this assured me that the school existed so i wasn't going to sign up and pay and find out it was an online school scam. so i began the course with ittp on friday and so far very satisfied with all aspects of the package. i feel they deserve a plug here so here is their website:
www.tefl-tesol-online.com
I don't know anything about threatening site administrators, fake reviews or any of the other crazy half-baked claims on this page but I think that one should validate this as fact first or just simply being equivalent to the brown slime which seeps from the rear end of the male version of the cow species.
Lets take into account all of the info on this page which also appears on complaints websites where people can post without any verification at all, and of which posts were obviously also set up by the same person who wasted his or her time on this blog: Ittp-tefl-reviews.blogspot.com.
SHOCKING isn't it!!!
why, all the same claims listed on those complaints board websites are also listed on this blog too!!!
but, I did some sniffing around and noticed that the .co.uk version of this site (that's Ittp-tefl-reviews.blogspot.co.uk folks btw) has been censored by Google. They have taken off the written claims which appear on the generic .com version of the blog and on the complaints sites.
why was the .co.uk version of this site deemed unpublishable by Google? I don't think they close blogs just for giggles as they take free speech seriously so why would they take off the .co.uk version of this blog, citing legal reasons, if everything written on this blog were based on fact? Mmmm :-D
Ittp-tefl-reviews.blogspot.co.uk
... because if it is deemed unsuitable for Google to publish it then you know it's essentially a load of man cow seeping goo :-)