Swallow Aquatics Colchester Reviews Summary

Staff and Customer Service

Pros:

• "Friendly helpful staff, with lots of knowledge on fish tanks and how to set them up."
• "The staff were incredibly friendly and very knowledgeable."
• "Swallow aquatics have always been helpful, knowledgeable and friendly."
• "Very helpful and friendly guy didn't catch his name assisted us with what we needed."
• "Spoke to a lovely lady on Friday with a query over my online order which I’d done that morning and she was extremely helpful and polite and sorted my query out within seconds."
• "Considering I was one of the last customers at the end of a long hot day, refreshing customer service and great knowledge of the fish I was interested in."
• "Staff are brilliant at attentiveness and advice, especially Frasier who works with the fish themselves."

Cons:

• "Staff on my 1st and only visit seam to walk pass you."
• "Unhelpful, ignorant staff."
• "Staff don’t seem to have any time for you."
• "Avoid buying birds from this place."
• "Very unprofessional and bored staff, asking some questions about pond products in the fish department and then the cashier was the cherry on the cake."
• "The staff were poorly educated and far too young (15/16 yrs old maybe) to offer any real advice and didn't enquire as to what set up the fish were going to be going in."
• "Tall guy with black hair always undermines me! really not helpful!"

Product and Stock Quality

Pros:

• "Awesome selection of all varieties of aquatic life, habitats and accessories."
• "Fish are well looked after."
• "The marine vertebrates section is excellent. There's lots of choice, and all the fish look healthy."
• "Great selection of tropical, marine and pond fish."
• "An excellent supply of aquarium, pond and salt water fish. All the fish seemed healthy in their tanks."
• "A fantastic selection of fish, freshwater (tropical and temperate) and marine."
• "Incredible range of livestock and products for both fresh and salt water fish."

Cons:

• "This place has really just gone down hill over the last year. the corals are all over priced and the tanks are full of pests as almost every coral I have brought has had something bad on it."
• "Grossly over priced live stock."
• "The only good thing in this whole aquatics centre is the selection of fish, whether or not they’ll survive is another thing."
• "Almost every tank is disgusting dirty."
• "Lots of dead plants that had dried out and not all enclosures were as humid as they should be."
• "All tanks containing corals are full of Aiptasia."
• "The corals are all overpriced and the display tanks are full of brown cyano algae."

Facility and Accessibility

Pros:

• "The rest of the shop is very good with some nice little shops inside."
• "Garden center is clean and lovely."
• "It was well stocked easy to get to wheelchair friendly."
• "Also the free big car park is a bonus."
• "This is a lovely nursery, incredibly well stocked, and well worth a visit."
• "The wider setting of the garden centre was also lovely as was the cafe."
• "Staff are friendly and helpful, plenty of parking."

Cons:

• "Garden center is clean and lovely but the reptile section (swallow aquatics) is dirty and very run down needs a makeover and serious tidy up."
• "However the reptile section needs improvement. A carpet python was wrapped around a heat bulb with no guard and crested Geckos had small tubs with only paper towel with little to no humidity and no climbing options."
• "A little more expensive than its competitor petstore chains, and a bit hard to get to without a car."
• "My main problem was whilst the cafe is shut for a refurb, there are no toilets!"
• "Very sad to see that the reptile side of things isn't as good as it used to be and not as well kept."
• "Once you entre the gates, you're greeted by surroundings of a muddy mess, Fields that have has stuff just dumped on them and it all just looks horrible."
• "There is also no petting zoo until next year.... The place could be made so much better than at present."