The Art League — Attraction in Alexandria

The sign-up process for the Art League is absolutely atrocious.

I’ve been a student here for several years and nothing has been done to streamline the process after patrons consistently complain about the antiquated procedures. They still do in person and faxed sign-ups inconveniently on a Monday morning. If you are choosing to test your luck through online sign-ups, the website will crash because of a mad frenzy of people trying to checkout and they won’t increase the server capacity during that period to account for the increased load.

If you are lucky enough to get through the online sign-up, you aren’t guaranteed a spot. It is a manual process that they must complete placing students in the class.

This is a broken system and the administrators of the Art League don’t seem to care. The general attitude towards customers that express their frustration is that the Art League has plenty of demand for their classes and sign ups are working fine.

There are many factors that are increasingly frustrating about this fixable problem. This is an unacceptable process especially for the concentration of engineering and technology talent available to fix this problem in...

The teachers have been great, the torpedo factory is very cool, but I can’t recommend it because it’s so horribly run. The woman in charge (Lizzy) is awful and really rude. They changed the class start date a bunch of times and wouldn’t refund my money; you can’t use your credit to purchase supplies; they won’t tell you what supplies are needed for the class you’re taking (you have to physically go to their store to get the list); and lastly, just signing up for a class doesn’t guarantee you’re in the class. I signed up for several and then got emails that the classes were full. It’s incredibly frustrating and honestly seems intentionally designed to take advantage of people - which sucks because the classes and teachers are awesome!

EDIT: this won’t allow me to respond so I wanted to follow up to the owner and say thank you for following up on my email and refunding the remainder of my money. I do hope that you will truly work on the admin/customer service side of the business because I otherwise really liked the school. Changing my rating to 3 stars because I do appreciate...

In my opinion, completely unprofessional, and the sole reason why a needy girls' charity won't be able to throw a fundraiser.

I won a "corporate retreat" here through a local charity auction, and decided to use it to support a needy girls' charity in Nepal. I let my friends go for free, conditioned on them donating money to the charity. Apparently, that wasn't welcome. I quickly received a threatening call from the Art League, saying that they "never promised" an event, and even threatening to have their law firm prevent me from helping donate to charity!

This isn't even to mention the other issues I had trying to set my up in the first place - endless calls to try to set it up, vagueness about what the class actually would offer, attempts to not provide the class in the first place (they kept saying their schedule was too full to offer it at any reasonable time, then offered something ridiculous like 1 PM on a weekday), etc.

Needless to say, I'll try to find the charity another venue, but I feel...