Arthur Murray Dance Studio

Dishonest business owner. 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.…

Do not trust the owner of this place!!!!. In terms of the instructors, the dancing and locations AM dance studios are good, I'll give them that. But there is always the sales pitch at the end of almost every lesson, and it is extremely difficult as a customer to keep track of how many dance lessons you've bought/used up.

My husband and I used to take dance lessons at the AM in Cleveland, which has (better: had) the same owner as the Wexford, PA studio. He closed the doors of the Cleveland studio without giving any kind of notice, not to mention any information as to how we were going to retrieve the money / dance lessons we had already paid for. His business behavior has been despicable, an absolute horror!!

We and everyone else we knew at the studio has not been able to recoup their investments, and his fishy deals that Mr. Mario Cardinali keeps offering have never turned out to be anything but empty promises and ways to keep us hanging in the air.

Therefore, if you are considering purchasing dance lessons from any Arthur Murray Dance Studio owned by Mr. Mario Cardinali - be very careful, or better yet: go to someone trustworthy!!! (I have meanwhile seen the practices of other dance franchises, where they put more money in an escrow fund and thus can only get your money after they've provided you the service you paid for - this is not the case here!)…