My wife and I took lessons for a few years at the Cleveland location, which was owned by the same guy, Mario Cardinali, who owns the Wexford studio. While the quality of the dance instruction is very good, Mr. Cardinali is in my opinion an unethical, if not fraudulent, business man.
We prepaid for a bunch of lessons, but the Cleveland studio closed abruptly in January 2011, without notice to the students. Since that time Mr. Cardinali's behavior has been extremely unprofessional and discourteous. We were told that we would receive our money back for the lessons we purchased, but that never happened, even after I and a bunch of other students sued Mr. Cardinali. He refused to waive the arbitration clause in our contract in order to discourage us from going after him. We were also promised that we would be provided with substitute lessons at another Cleveland area studio if we dropped our claim, but again Mr. Cardinali has yet to take any concrete steps to make that happen. Mr. Cardinali drives around a very expensive car and makes a lot of money from his dance studios and other businesses but is continuing to fight tooth-and-nail to avoid reimbursing us a few thousand dollars for lessons we purchased but never received or to provide us with substitute lessons.
I would not recommend taking lessons from any studio owned by Mario Cardinali. If you must take lessons at Arthur Murray, I highly recommend that you do not prepay for a substantial number of lessons, since you risk that Mr. Cardinali will break the contract and put up a hard fight to prevent you from getting your money back.
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