Well, just sent my relatively new Karma up for a simple sunset video, got a “battery error landing in place” warning and it dropped like a rock right out of the sky onto my backyard flagstone and everything, including the camera, is destroyed. Obviously will be calling GoPro in morning. I purchased in January, and GoPro better come through. Any suggestions, based on a similar experience?
This seems to be a running theme. Adding my story in case it helps anyone avoid making the same mistake we did and buying this TERRIBLE PRODUCT:
I’ve never been more infuriated and disappointed in a brand. Poor quality product and worst customer service team I have ever encountered!!! We purchased this drone bundle prior to our honeymoon in hopes to use it many more times as we began our family. After only having it for less than 6 months, that was cut short. We took every precaution in configuring it correctly before our last flight, got the green light to go and after only minutes of flying it, the device said it was losing wi-fi connection, which triggered its autopilot mode. During its auto-flight back to us it, it lost control and crashed into a pond below it (that it had autopiloted over). I didn't realize until after, but in reading and researching further, this is actually a common problem. Because it relies on wi-fi it's extremely unreliable and can fall from the sky or hit objects in its path during the autoflight back pretty regularly. And when it does, GoPro refuses to take any accountability so you will not get your money back, even if you have a warranty on it.
We spent hours trying to retrieve it, but could not and deemed it too dangerous to attempt again and near impossible to find any ways. We contacted customer service to see what our options were since we had a two year warranty on it and were only met with robotic responses, a refusal to take any accountability and blame towards us as their consumers, with no real reasonable logic. There was absolutely nothing we could have done differently given the resources that GoPro had provided to have avoided that outcome. When prying to ask to see the flight logs they said they were confidential and would not share them with me, yet used that as an excuse to say that they decided it was not their fault. The main thing they used to blame it on user error was by saying we didn’t properly avoid the possible “wi-fi interference objects” and then they provided a list of objectives you should avoid when flying. The ONLY applicable object in this case was water! Yes, water! So all those advertisements you see on this page and throughout their website and other marketing materials with water on it, turns out you can’t actually do what they are falsely advertising and we should have known that as consumers!!!! For goodness sake, their main video has a man literally launch the karma drone off of his kayak in the middle of the ocean!!! But I should have known to not fly nearby a cranberry bog reservoir!? After months of arguing and being pushed from one terrible customer service representative to another, they offered to replace the least expensive parts, still requiring us to invest $700 for those parts to even work, and spend more money with a brand we no longer could trust. After even more arguing they offered a jokeable 20% discount. And finally, I spoke with an extremely rude and condescending customer service “supervisor”, who by no means should be in this business, that basically sternly told me to give up, take the discount and that they wouldn’t do anything else even if we found it. For a brand that thrives off of human experiences and leverages happy life milestones, they certainly ruined our honeymoon (all our footage was lost) and our babymoon, which we had hoped to use this on as well and were still arguing with them about, and did not deliver the least bit enjoyable customer service experience. I would NOT RECOMMEND buying products from this company unless you are okay wasting your money when they prematurely break and do not anticipate any understanding from the manufacturer. I hope this saves someone months of frustration in dealing with this company and some money.
