• Scandia Marine is a Marine Services Company owned & operated by Erik and Martha Lostrom out of Whitehall Marina in Annapolis, MD o Since Scandia took over marine services at Whitehall Marina, 07/01/2014, I have hired them for at least 3 separate services. For those three services, by Scandia’s own record, I paid them within 30 days, 21 days, and 2 weeks of invoice. o Scandia’s invoices state that they “Are Due Upon Receipt”. Thus according to Martha Lostrom, I therefore paid Scandia “late” x 30 days, 21 days, and 2 weeks on each or her invoices, as by her accounting, I was “late” as soon as she hit the send button on the invoices that she emailed to me. o Additionally, Scandia’s invoices are “due upon receipt” regardless of whether or not the work for which they were contracted was diagnosed and completed correctly. Scandia’s most serious lapse in this respect was the most recent job that Scandia attempted on my boat which was to diagnose and repair a “very substantial flood in my boat's bilge" that I had experienced on my most recent outing, which I advised Scandia that I had aborted due to safety concerns related to the flooding. o With Scandia’s mechanic on board, the source of the flooding was not obvious with the boat in the slip. Therefore I took Scandia’s mechanic on a brief cruise so that he could study the problem while I manned the helm. Scandia’s resulting diagnosis was that my bilge was flooding due to compromised stuffing in my boat’s rudder post. Scandia charged circa $300 for diagnosis and replacement of the RP stuffing which I paid (“late” - within 2 weeks of invoice). o Trusting that Scandia’s “repair” of my flooding bilge (for which I had already fully paid) was diagnosed accurately, and repaired correctly, I left the slip with a number of young kids on board. Within the first hour of the trip, I experienced at least an equal amount of bilge flooding as was the case prior to Scandia’s so called “repair”. Annoyed by the faulty diagnosis of the flooding problem (not to mention Martha’s rude, belligerant business manner), I again aborted the trip due to quite obvious and serious safety concerns for the boat and for the kids. o On the next business day after that (2nd) aborted trip, I insisted that Martha’s husband Erik come on board such that I could "re-explain" the problem to him in yet another attempt to get my bilge flooding problem diagnosed and repaired correctly by Scandia... Within 5 minutes of boarding the boat, Erik shined his flashlight on an unsecured “open” thru-hull (AS IN *** IN THE BOTTOM OF THE BOAT!!) in the starboard aft lazaret compartment. Once identified, this was a very simple fix which I completed myself with a few minutes of my time. o While I concur that replacing the stuffing in the rudder post was a useful thing to do, due to its age, that’s not the problem that I hired Scandia to fix. To my amazement (and perhaps the reader’s), even today, Scandia remains indignant, and will not admit that they made a mistake by identifying the rudder post stuffing as the primary source of the substantial bilge flooding instead of identifying THE HOLE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE BOAT, WITHIN INCHES OF THE RUDDER POST as the correct primary source of the flooding. o Instead of apologizing for Scandia’s own quite dangerous mistake, Martha Lostrom chose to exert her energies repeatedly berating me as a “delinquent, slow pay” customer (again we are talking 3 invoices paid - according to Martha - within 30 days, 21 days, and 2 weeks of invoice - $’S PAID FOR EGREGIOUSLY INCORRECT, UNSAFE, and INCOMPLETE WORK). o In fairness, admittedly, after tolerating Matha’s belligerent, rude business manner (from July 2014 through May 2015), combined with her pathetic attempt to cover up for Scandia’s, at best incomplete, and arguably incompetent. diagnosis and repair of my boat's quite serious safety problem, that left both my boat and my kids in quite real danger, AND not even coming close to acknowledging that or apologizing for that ---- When she called me a delinquent, slow pay for her last time in May 2015, yes, I went “nuclear” on her and said quite a few “unprofessional” things to her in return, all of which in my opinion. she very richly deserved... o This post is a much more professional explanation of why I will NEVER, EVER do business with Scandia Marine again. Based on my personal experience with Scandia Marine co-owner, Martha Lostrom’s consistent, rude, abusive, unapologetic, unprofessional business manner, if you would prefer NOT to be treated this way as a Scandia customer, I stronly encourage you to look elsewhere for your professional marine services too!!!
Let's apply a little logic here ... Most likely you are only going to take the trouble to write a positive review of a company if you are Super Happy / Satisfied with the products & services that you obtained from that vendor.
Likewise, you are most likely to write a Negative review of a vendor only if you are Super UNhappy, or actually driven to the point of ANGRY by that vendor. That's just simple common sense. With that lesson, apply your own common sense to the ratio of Scandia's negative reviews to Scandia's positive reviews on this site (overwhelmingly negative), and come to your own conclusion. None of Scandia's negative reviews come from a customer who "had an axe to grind" with Scandia when they hired Scandia to address their problem.
Rather, Scandia's negative reviews on this site come only from customers who were so upset with Scandia's services and/or customer relations behavior that they invested their own personal time to tell their story here. Their hope is that these Personal reviews of the services and customer relations provided by Scandia, by REAL Scandia customers, will help fellow boaters compare Scandia's performance to the performance reviews of other like vendors in the area, and then make an educated decision regarding the vendor that they would like to work on their boat. These authors were not born with feelings of quite poor services and customer relations provided by Scandia Marine running through their veins!! Instead these poor reviews of Scandia Marine are on honest assessment of their quite unhappy experience with the services and arrogant, rude custmer relations provided by Scandia!!
C'mon!! These authors did not "collude' to post negative reviews of Scandia Marine!! Heck, they don't even know each other!!
Yet there's a theme that is common to all of their stories. That's just Common Sense!!