Mountain Training School MTS Beware of change in payment plans, hidden fees, merchandise not sent/refund not given Palmer Alaska

Thanks for the chance to reply to the student who had some issues about the Mountain Training School

I want to first acknowledge that for the student to write on this site she clearly felt angry and frustrated in her attempts to reach a resolution with us, No one ends up here by accident. So I would first off like to apologize that we failed to communicate well enough to reach a resolution without this review needing to happen. That is our responsibility.

 We have since contacted the student involved and have come to a resolution that she is happy with. She has said that she would write an update to her post to reflect this.

 Even though we have reached a resolution with the student I still would like to address some of the specific issues raised in the review. 

Before I begin I would like to say that this particular student’s enrolment and participation in our course was not standard and much of the confusion was as a result of us trying to work out a solution for her by changing her original enrolment. We took her out of some courses she was initially enrolled in when it was obvious they were not a good fit for her, and enrolled in her in different courses. This meant she was outside of any standard arrangement for both courses and payment.

 Loan Agreements

We presented this student with a loan agreement on the first week of the course as we did with all the students. Because of her circumstances at that time she was unsure of what she wanted to do, so she did not sign the original document at that time. But she certainly had seen it as I sat down with all the students and went over their loan agreements with them individually. Later the student wanted to defer her payment to after the course (in effect paying less money per payment and having more time to pay). We were amendable to that and said we would honor an older payment plan at her request.

However ultimately the payment plan became a moot point as the student’s situation overall changed and she ended up only doing a part of the course.

The student signed a contract with the school committing to the two year program and to paying the full course fees. For various reasons it became clear that this was in fact not the right course for her. We did our best to maximize the learning she was able to do and tailored her program to suit her needs. We also released her from her commitment to the 2 year program as it was clear that was the best course of action. This resulted in a sizeable loss of income for the school, but we felt it was the right thing to do for all parties. She only ended up paying for the courses she participated in.  

Because her enrollment had changed from a standard two-year course, our original contract with her for course prices also changed. The courses she enrolled in which were not a part of her original agreement with us were charged at our existing prices for stand alone courses. I ackowledge that we did not do a good job of clearly communicating this change in our relationship with the student.

To address specifically the complaint about receiving continued invoices. I take responsibility for that happening; it was a system error from an automated invoice set mistakenly being sent as it had not been cancelled when the student’s situation changed. This happened only with two invoices and we cancelled the invoices as soon as we were told of the mistake. I apologize for the distress this has caused and want say clearly that it was a mistake with no intention to harass or cause upset. We have made changes to better track our payments so that this will not happen again. We know have a double check system in place to catch administrative errors before they impact on the students.

To address issues with gear, yes there were some shortfalls with gear I acknowledge that. I again apologize for the trouble this caused her, and we have resolved the issue of the gear that was missing with the student.  

We have worked on changing the systems we use for ordering and tracking gear and have trained our staff better to avoid these problems in the future.

We have also recently purchased a permanent base camp in Alaska, which will solve the problem of the showers and laundry as they are now provided at our new base. We are a small company and every season we make improvements with our facilities as we are able to make our students lives both on and off course more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Please note that the school directors were also living at the same building and experiencing the same lack of facilities, we were very aware of the shortfalls of this basecamp and remedied it as soon as the school had the resources to do so.  At the fomer basecamp we provided transport to town for students to facilitate laundry and showers.

We have certainly learnt a lot from this experience and have changed our procedures and systems to reflect this. Again I appreciate the opportunity to reply to this review.