Business ProfileforBroadreach, Inc.

Message to Broad Reach HYGIENE: First of all, I wanted to thank Broad Reach for the opportunities that were presented during the duration of my 12 day sailing and scuba trip. Sitting here today, I am appreciative that I was able to experience the good and the bad. Unfortunately, the cons deceivingly out weighed the pros. My goal is to keep my review as short as possible, because I am sure that I am not the only person that sees the astonishing amount of flaws fluent in Broad Reach. I chose to attend Broad Reach’s program in order to pursue exploring God’s creation and my interests. Each and every person had their own motives in why they wanted to attend. However, for the people I talked to, each one of them expressed their concerns about the health and well-being of every participant. Approaching and boarding the boat I was highly impressed with how clean and organized everything seemed. Far above my perception, I was rudely awakened with the comment stated on the second day by one of my instructors; “It is Broad Reach, everything breaks”. At first the comment flew over my head and didn’t hold such magnitude. This was until the first occurrence of the human feces and the sewage problem. I speak for everyone when I say it is our job take accountability; however, this was far to long for this to be a students problem. By the fourth day, the smell aboard was horrific to the point where we no longer could stay in our rooms for more than 2 minutes. The smell from the cabin had traveled to the saloon. To put yourselves in our shoes, imagine after a long day, you sit down to eat dinner and all you can fathom and smell is human waste. This is the last thing my parents want to hear and I want to experience after paying thousands of dollars. The sewage problem became so repetitive to the point were one of the instructors had to blow the sewage out of the pipe with an air tank. Like seriously?? These instructors didn’t sign up to blow human feces

We appreciate you taking the time to write out and submit your concerns about your Caribbean 12-day sailing and scuba experience this summer. I am sorry and disappointed to hear that your trip fell so far short of your expectations. You raise a number of very serious concerns about your program experience; I appreciate your patience while I look into your concerns and try to get a better idea of what happened on this program and how we can do better in the future. While I am not there right now, I have spent 20 years in the Caribbean with our programs and understand many of the issues that can come up. Things on boats sometimes break, marine toilets can (will) get clogged if toilet paper or feminine products are flushed down there, and those toilets sometimes have to be unclogged over the course of the summer. I don't intend this to be dismissive at all, but these things do come up on program and need to be addressed and debriefed with the students so you can have the proper context to understand them. It is my goal that every Broadreach student has an amazing experience on our trips. While it sounds like you had some positive experiences too, unfortunately, it seems they were tainted with some of the challenges you noted in your review here and elsewhere. I appreciate you raising your concerns and sharing your specific feedback with me over email as well as through reviews on different websites. I am going to be undertaking a thorough review of your concerns, this program, the staff, and feedback from other students to try to get to the bottom of where we fell short on this program and what lessons we can apply to improve our systems going forward. I have reached out to you and will be happy to circle back with you once I have had the chance to explore this a little deeper. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us directly if you have questions.