Feedback for Ailola Buenos Aires

Reviewed on 24/02/2018 by Simon from Freiburg

Overall I am very happy with having chosen Ailola Buenos Aires. I improved my Spanish a lot and that is the overall goal. However, I have a few comments regarding matters that could be approved. First of all, I remember having paid around 60€ as a "sign-up-fee". It said that a city tour and the material were included in this fee. For the tour I have to say that the school provided a lot of trips to different places in the city. However, the material was not of high quality in my opinion. While I don't mind receiving a black and white copy I (more eco-friendly I guess) I was not 100% satisfied with the material in general. There were no clear overviews of grammar topics and the lessons itself were not always that well structured in my opinion. While the school claims to focus on communication (which is great) a little more structure may be helpful to grasp especially topics related to grammar. Further, the CD players' audio quality was so bad that it was hard to understand the content. Overall, I must say that I find the sign-up-fee of 60€ not justified. For the customer it would be nicer if the fee would be put additionally on to the weekly fee instead of a fix charge, to avoid this "bad-surprise" of additional costs. Moreover, I was a little surprised when I noticed that my residence (Menlo Park Student House) was more than 40 min away from the school, due to the fact that the description said it was in walking distance. In the end I did not mind it too much, since BA is big and large distances are part of the life here. Also MP is located in Palermo which was great, again, the point is that I think some details could be communicated better in order to let the customer know what he/she can expect.

Hi Simon,

Many thanks for your review and very great feedback. Regarding your points:

1.) Sign up fee: Well, that is a double-sided sword. Ideally there would be no fee at all. However we have certain one-time costs per booking (city tour, learning materials, etc.) that are covered by the fee. Including them in the weekly fee isn't fair neither because they are mostly one-time costs which we don't want to charge weekly from our students. We communicate clearly these fees beforehand (e.g. https://www.ailolabuenosaires.com/en/prices and in the booking confirmation). At the moment I don't see the a chance to change this. We have discussed this topic internally several times and didn't find a better solution. Your point regarding the quality of learning materials is a good point which I forwarded to our school director.

2.) CD Player: Yes, that's a great point which I forwarded to our school director, too.

3.) Structure of lessons: I forwarded this point to our academic director as well.

4.) Distance to student residence: The Menlo Park Student House is currently not listed on our website. We have only listed the San Cristóbal Student Residence (https://www.ailolabuenosaires.com/en/accommodation/student-residence) which is in walking distance to our school. I'm not sure about the email communication right now and maybe it wasn't clear that these are different student residences. I forwarded this feedback to our school director to further improve the communication with future students.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback. Your points were really valuable. We discuss this feedback on a regular basis to plan further improvements.

Should you re-visit us next time, I hope that we have been able to improve until then ;-)

All the best,

Philip and the Ailola Buenos Aires tea,