There's only so much that can be said over the phone/email. Before starting training it is definitely required to go talk to an instructor face to face anyways.
Talking to the flight schools in person won't be wasting time. It will only take an hour or 2, and if your goal is to get an ATPL, you'll be spending many thousand hours at the airport. Those 1 or 2 hours will probably be the best spent hours of the thousands of hours.