They don't care about customer experience
I love a good yoga retreat, and I first went on a yoga retreat with Free Spirit in 2022. I had a lovely time, so I booked another one in 2024, but this time to a different location and with a different teacher. For my first trip I went to Grenadine Lodge, Dalyan in Turkey. For my second trip I went to Kissamos in Crete. After my first trip I had reasonable expectations for what the second retreat would be like. These expectations were not met.
The venue in Crete was a restaurant with a few rooms that they let out for yoga retreats. The food was lovely, but that was about all the venue had to recommend itself. For meals, restaurant customers were seated on the terrace overlooking the sea, but everyone on the yoga retreat was crammed onto an indoor table too small for the size of the group. The accommodation was old and tired and deeply uncomfortable. The mattress was so worn it had lumps and bumps all over it, making it impossible to sleep on. The pillows were so flattened and hardened that they were like sleeping on a kerb. I was given a mattress topper for my second night which improved things marginally, but by the end of the week that had given up too. There was a 12" gap between the shower tray and the bottom of the shower curtain, so every time I had a shower the bathroom floor was flooded. The towels were threadbare and worn, and were replaced only once during the week I was there.
If you go on a yoga retreat you expect that some of the people there will have been to classes with the teacher before, and that’s ok. On this occasion, it transpired that of the twelve people on the retreat, eight of them were regulars at the same yoga class in Milton Keynes, and had been going on retreats together for the last seven years. Cliquey doesn’t even begin to cover it. The general election happened while we were away, and the morning afterwards none of them were happy with the result, because they were Tory voters. I don’t mind how people vote. When you think about what the human soul goes through in the course of a lifetime, politics is very small beer indeed. But when yoga literally means unity, and is a philosophy based on the idea of all living beings living together in peace and harmony, I don’t understand how you can practice yoga when you are vocal in your contempt for refugees and unemployed people. And banging on at dinner about how sick you are of vegetarian food and how much you’re craving a steak isn’t witty or hilarious. It’s just crass.
Happily for the group, the philosophical side of yoga – something you’d expect at least a bit of on a yoga retreat - was conspicuous by its absence. The teacher knew her audience well, and didn’t include any of the aspects of yoga that erred towards peace and unity, or self-awareness. There was no pranayama (breathwork), no mudras (ritual gestures) and certainly no aum (omm). There was very limited use of the Sanskrit names for the asanas (poses) and bafflingly the teacher chose to play pop music during practice. Have you heard contemporary pop music? It’s all really weird lyrics about co-dependence, stalking and quasi-abusive relationships, dressed up as love songs, or macho rappers swearing and bragging about their sexual conquests. It’s not something most grown-ups would listen to, and it’s certainly not an appropriate aural accompaniment to a moving meditation like yoga. But then, whatever else was happening at this venue, it wasn’t that much of a yoga retreat. It was a holiday for the uncurious with their favourite gym instructor, with a couple of other people like me making up the numbers.
When I got back to the UK I contacted Free Spirit, and explained the problems with the yoga and with the venue. They misrepresented my views, and suggested it was my fault for booking onto the retreat in the first place. They suggested I should have gone for a different style of yoga. They then passed my comments on to the teacher, whose response was to remove me from the whatsapp group.
I had one good experience with Free Spirit Yoga, and one absolutely terrible one. And on the basis of their response to the latter, I’m not inspired to book a third trip with them. When it comes to yoga retreats, there are lots of other options, and in the future I’ll be exploring them instead.
