I've recently succumbed to their advertising - "Our focus is on you", The Economist testimonials - and subscribed to their "service". Not only did they "assign" a tutor who's booked out for the next two weeks, they are not even refunding my first month subscription fee. The fee is rather high (double?) too, its about $300 a month for up to 3 lessons a week. I hope Paypal will return my money, given this HK company's only reaction to a Paypal dispute was to block my access completely:)
Lessons learned:
Don't trust advertising (duh), even if it comes from The Economist
Never get into a subscription deal, only consider pay-per-lesson variants like they have on italki.com
eChineseLearning.com is particularly bad because you're not in control of anything - you only get to select a time slot, and if your "tutor" is not available that day (which is common, unless you book like a month in advance) you get a random substitution.
PS - italki.com turned out to be awesome, I regret of not starting from it to begin with.
UPDATE: Funnily, their michael_echineselearning dude (via Skype) has been blackmailing me to remove all my comments or they won't refund any money, sheesh.
"basically, what we said [to Paypal] is that we will refund the payment as soon as you have cancelled all comments online about echineselearning, including but not limited to the ones on twitter and reddit."
Hi V O.,
Thank you for your feedback. We refunded the payment to you for lessons not taken without any condition.
Regards,
James Lin
EChineseLearning