1) The worse offenders were a few years back. A company up in the north were so crooked they went to jail!!! So what they did was request customers pay in full in advance by cheque for their hot tubs on the promise that they got a lower price and would receive their spa sooner. Then they took months and months without delivering. Then after giving up waiting customers eventually tried to take them to court only to find out that the company had gone bust! Then the crooks set up a new company with a different name and the scam continued. Eventually trading standards caught up with them and sent them to jail. So my advice here is only pay a small deposit with a credit card. That way you are covered for this scam.
2) The second scammers are still in business today after a similar trick of making the company go bust then setting up the next week with a slightly different name. Then they told customers they couldn’t help them with their warranty issues as the old company didn’t exist. And yet the company was in the exact same showroom with the exact same staff!!! Can you believe it? My advice here is to check out the company records which is an easy search on the net. If they not been trading that long beware!!
3) A little trick to try to sell you a cheap hot tub that’s not really cheap at all is to produce the spa quite shallow. A shallow tub will cost much less to produce but may be terrible to sit in. Most hot tubs are around 90-95cm which is ample for the average adult but we’ve seen
some advertised at 75cm which might be much too short. It might be OK in the warmer summer months but it the winter your shoulders will be freezing so not really useable. This does depend on the mold of the tub so best advice is to visit the showroom and climb in to test for yourself!
4) Some spa sales scammers will tell you that all the components are inter changeable with other brands so you can always buy parts locally if required. LIE, LIE, LIE. Although this is true of some parts like pumps etc it is not true of most other parts like jets, divertor handles, filter housings etc, etc. So if you buy a spa that you can’t source parts for you are stuck and the spa is just scrap. When you buy a car the manufacturer promises to supply parts for many years of the life of that car. The same can be said from a decent spa brand. My advice is to check out the brand. If you can’t access parts in the future you may be forced to scrap a perfectly good tub!
5) Most spa pumps are between 2HP and 3HP and with spas power is important! And most buyers compare models depending on how many pumps each has. Simple right? So the spa scammers have produced spas with much smaller pumps like 1HP or 1.5HP but hide that information from the buyer. Thus the buyer sees a low priced hot tub with 2 pumps and thinks they’re getting a bargain but with only 2 x 1HP pumps that model is still 30% lower powered than a single pump spa with a 3HP pump. So my advice is to check the power of the pumps.
