A quick word to say that DJI Support is fantastic
(I have not been paid or incentivized to write this post, these are my own personal views)
Don’t do what I did — crash your DJI Mavic Pro into the hotel during your vacation. It was an embarrassing combination of forgetting that Sport Mode switches off forward collision avoidance and general showing off.
I was left with a pretty beaten up drone - a snapped-off camera and gimbal, severed ribbon cables and plenty of scuffs across the body of the camera.
I was pretty freaked out that my $1000 drone was screwed. However to my delight, I discovered that DJI have established a comprehensive support process for damage like this. Here’s the overview:
- Upon damaging your drone you log into your DJI account and list the details. DJI Support assign you a case number and give you a shipping label to print out.
- Next, they receive the drone and tell you how much it will cost to fix. In my case they only charged $170, which not only included shipping both ways but ended up providing me with a totally new (refurbished) drone.
- The whole process took less than a week, including shipping in both directions.
- When I received my replacement a few days later, I realized my propellers were worn and damaged from the accident and I needed to replace them ($20 cost). Amazon and local suppliers were out of stock. I freaked out a little but then stumbled over two sets of replacement props hidden at the bottom of the package they had sent my fixed drone back to me in!
It’s little things like thinking to include the replacement drone propellers and going out of the way to ensure it’s easy to ship drones back for replacement that make me really appreciate DJI. I don’t know if they broke even on $170 (esp now I learn that included $20 worth of propellers) but they’ve won a customer for life.
The drone market is still quite ‘wild west’. Many of the Chinese* drones feel like V1’s or lean on crudely written software (* = yes, I know DJI is also a Chinese brand). DJI’s hardware, software and customer support feels ‘Apple quality’ and installs a lot of confidence in their brand.
