Stowaway Adventures

My partner and I booked a week long sailing trip with Graham about 3 months in advance, starting June 1, 2015. Upon booking we were required to pay a deposit, which came to around $ 600. First red flag was the fact that they only accepted payment via email money transfer, didn’t think about this until after the fact unfortunately. Anyways, as we all know, sometimes life can get in the way — we ended up putting an offer on our first home and unfortunately had to reschedule the trip because of timing conflicts.
We contacted Graham about a month before the trip was to begin to enquire about rescheduling and informed him of the situation. We got a huge guilt-​trip from him, telling us how if we rescheduled we would be ruining someone else’s trip that booked for the same time and how it was really rude to try and reschedule. He was also trying to get into our personal business about buying our home and tell us that we can do anything we need to from the boat — long story short, he was very unhelpful and very unprofessional. We ended the conversation by letting him know that we’ll think it over and give him a call back and let him know our decision.
At this point, after speaking to him on the phone, we weren’t really comfortable shelling out more money to this guy, even if we could reschedule — we decided to cancel. We were fully aware that by canceling we would probably end up losing our deposit. We phoned Graham and left several messages. He never returned our calls. We even sent him an email letting him know our choice and that we understood if he had to keep the deposit — we just wanted to know what the situation was. But, alas, we never heard back from the guy. He kept our money with no explanation and ran. No recourse since we paid via email money transfer, too.
Spend the extra couple hundred dollars and go with a reputable sailing school, steer clear of Stowaway Adventures.