Valastro International Academy

You HIGHLY SUCK, bunch of THIEVES. Will never recommend to anyone else. They just took my money and did not even get to the range. Now they don’t even answer the phone. I’ve been waiting for groupon to refund my money they mega suck. Do not waste your money. No stars

Lame.
I too purchased the Groupon deal. Guy Valastro did seem to be a nice guy who cared a lot, and the shooting was fun, but it was overall about 15 minutes of range time and 2 hours of sitting in a hot room waiting your turn. Not worth going all the way out to NCC for that.

The regular guy was out so we had a substitute teacher. The class beforehand consisted of him telling us not to lean on the counter. I thought that maybe we’d get taught more while we were actually shooting. The teacher made sure to give excellent advice to all of the pretty girls. The rest of us, he just gave us a loaded rifle and said nothing. Also, he kept forgetting to give us the safety equipment. There was also a woman there helping him teach. She kept putting her hand on my shoulder and pushing making impossible to aim. One of the rifle’s she had us shoot had a fancy electronic sight that was supposed to show a green dot where you aim but it wasn’t working reliably and when you told her that you couldn’t see the green dot, she would roll her eyes and snatch the gun away.
It is definitely not two hours of shooting. It is much more like ten minutes of shooting and two hours and waiting around for other people to shoot.

This is my first Unilocal review… POP!
I felt that it was my duty to share my reservations regarding this «academy.»
My first (and fairly big) issue with this place is that they don’t actually go over GUN SAFETY. Case in point, the only time the instructor has been shot was by a GroupOn student. That raised an immediate RED FLAG.
Second, the instructor, Valastro, was a misogynist pig. In the «safety slide show» — all of examples of what not to do were depicted by women in short skirts. This is disgusting and offensive in itself, but only displaying what NOT to do does not mean I would know WHAT I should be doing. (And lets be clear, I went with a big guy friend who cried about feeling pain in his shoulder and I had no problems with the rifle kick back.)
They gave a quick run down of what rifles we were using, but never once demonstrated what we were doing with them.
Once we went from the class room to the shooting range, it became a little more fun, but was still highly unorganized. No clear semblance of where the lines should be and where people should go after they finished the first rifle shot. Only minimal instruction on how to use each rifle — basically where you put your finger to shoot.
If you really want to learn more about rifles and guns, this is not the place to go, especially if you’re female. There is very little attention to actual instructing and safety feels like an after thought.

Very poor quality service by Mr. Valastro himself! You have to go to Queen’s first to see an instructional video from the 80s that tell you not to touch the gun if you don’t know what to do with it!!! Its a total waste of time. Then you have to drive for 50 minutes to Long Island where the range is. He gave us a third of the ammo that was advertised because he said there is a shortage of ammo in the United States of America!!! What a non sense! After all that driving and waste of time, you get to shoot for 5 – 7 minutes by a very old rifle that jammed after every single shot and a clunky shotgun that left serious bruises on my arm by its backlash. DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY AND TIME

Valestro International Academy. It sounds big and fancy. It’s a small supply shop that offers various services. My experience is via a Groupon deal. The deal stated, «$ 49 for a Two-​Hour Shooting-​Range Package for One ($ 250 value)» which sounded incredibly good but, I had read the mostly negative reviews beforehand so I wasn’t too crestfallen in the end. Let’s just say I would be angry if I had paid $ 250.
For the deal, you go to Valestro in Queens for a background check and watch two boring videos. Then you hop in your vehicle (or get a ride from a friendly, fellow grouponer) to the range in Nassau county. Why so far? Because the laws in the NYC area are terrible. Basically, you have to go to Long Island to exercise your second amendment right even just a teeny bit.
Anyway, the first video was a ridiculous commercial for Benelli shotguns. I guess it’s to keep us entertained while they do the background checks. The second video can be summed up with the NRA’s three basic safety rules: Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.
Guns included are 22 rifle, .410 shotgun, 308-​caliber rifle, 223-​caliber rifle, and 12-​gauge shotgun. The 22 rifle is super easy, something a twelve year old can shoot at bible camp. The rest are pretty much all Unilocal five star worthy and require whole body control. The experience is both a humbling and exhilarating.
Long story short, it’s more like two to four hours of waiting for only about ten minutes of shooting time. Also, Mr Valestro and his son (?) seemed like they’d both rather be somewhere else and even downright rude at times but thank goodness for the third guy who was sincerely enthusiastic, in a word AWESOME. If it weren’t for him, this wouldn’t have been a three star review. He was that good. We were really glad we got him!

a bit misleading when they say 2 hour shooting experience. you shoot until you are out of ammo. closer to 20 minutes of shooting time. you start with some training videos in Queens drive out to L.I. and shoot out there… all in all it was worth it.

The bulk of their customers are either from Living Social, Groupon, or some sort of deals site. They told us that they have received some 6,000 or so customers this way — which leads me to wonder how they have not thoroughly streamlined this process.
1 hour shooting exp. You show up at their site which is in Glendale, Queens. Public transportation is scarce so… yep. Also, a big TO NOTE: SHOOTING RANGE IS NOT ON SITE. It’s all the way in Nassau County. Long Island. It’s about 20 – 30 minutes or so via car but you have to travel VIA CAR.
Anyhows back to Glendale. You go to glendale, fill out your information so they can perform a background check on you to make sure you’re capable of handling firearms. While they are processing this, you watch a Benelli shotgun trick shooting video and an NRA firearm safe handling video. Both are 80s films. The shotgun trick shooting is mildly entertaining. The NRA video is meant to brainwash you ‘guns dont kill people, people kill people’.
After the video, you take your instructions which are actually really terrible. 5 bullet points:
start jackie robison
merge grand central
etc.
You’re also told that your GPS, iphone dadada is not able to find the location of the shooting range. So you need to follow the instructions on the paper to the ‘T’. What is typically useful on directions is the compass directions or the exit numbers to look out for: ‘Merge Grand Central Pkway WEST Exit _​_​_​’ and so forth. Come on! common sense! Especially if you’re telling people they can’t trust their devices!
You get to the site, wait around for the Valastro guys to show up. They go through some basic instructions with you and then you volunteer on who goes first. GO FIRST. Guns heat up after repeated firings and can jam. Best to get it fresh. .22 rifle shoots like a bb gun. 12 gauge shotgun kicks like mule. A fun 10 minutes of blasting a target at 15 ft. but after you’re done going through the ammo which they’ve aloted for you Groupon states (about 60 rounds for rifle, 3 – 4 rounds for shotgun) you get to keep your target and a shotgun shell casing. You can leave.
The Valastro guys are nice in that seen-​it-​all-​wise-​ass cop/​ex-​military guy sort of way, they seem to know what they’re doing with their guns and have years of exp. under their belts.
Calling it a 1-​hour shooting exp. is misleading as you believe you’ll be firing guns for an hour — which you aren’t. Private transportation is needed as public is not available.
Should you go learn how/​try to shoot a gun? Yes. It was a lot of fun.
Should you go through Valastro? M’eh. That is definitely debatable.

This was the worst experience I’ve had using groupons. I give it ZERO stars.
1) They do not tell you anywhere on the groupon that the training location is different from the shooting range. You need to DRIVE 30 min to the shooting range after watching a trick shooting video and a 10 minute gun safety video from 1993 as training.
2) Then we left to meet up at the shooting range at 2PM and I waited TWO hours in the lobby without any A/​C, to finally get 5 minutes worth of «shooting training» at 4PM.
3) They drastically overbook themselves — I went with a group of about 40 people. They call you in as groups of 12 people at a time, with each group of 12 taking about an hour before they called in the next group (hence my 2 hour wait, being in the 3^rd group).Once you actually get into the shooting range floor, there are only 3 stalls open with one instructor per stall. 3 people are actively shooting, while the other 9 wait in line AGAIN, staring them down impatiently. The shooting was literally 5 minutes, and you feel rushed by both the impatient customers staring at you AND the trainers themselves.
4) Because there were only 2 rifles for 40 people, used immediately after each other, the gun was overheated and the bullets in the rifle kept jamming. The time it took for my instructor to unclear jams, unload and reload the gun took longer than the actual shooting. The shotgun part was 3 shots which took less than 30 seconds to finish.
5) You would think that being one of the last people, after a 2 hour wait in the hot lobby, with no indication of how much longer things would take, that they would be at least a LITTLE bit sympathetic /​apologetic. But instead, they rushed us the most, seeing that their day was almost over and they wanted to go home. There were no apologies, it seemed like WE were the ones annoying THEM.