Bad Trend in TripAdvisor's 2011 Reviews Re: 42 Reviews on Tripadvisor - Most very Positive

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olarmy
C&TSRR got some good reviews on Tripadvisor. 87% positive.

IMHO, that Tripadvisor link is not something you want potential riders to see.

When you read reviews on user-submitted sites, the two questions you have to ask yourself are (1) How recent are these reviews and (2) are the reviews real or astroturf?

When I check the Tripadvisor reviews posted in 2011, I see a really disturbing trend: 3 out of these 9 reviews are negative, so their rating (of the current season) is really only 66%, not 87%.

Worse, the negative reviews are extremely caustic and describe situations tourists worry about: “WORSE EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE”, “BEWARE!!! Huge Cancellation Fee”, and “Bad Reservations and Lack of Busses”. Being so memorable, those reviews stick in the mind more than the positive reviews.

While some of the negative reviews are from drive-by posters (register, post a rant, then are never heard from again), I don't see anything in those three reviews to doubt the authenticity of those negative reviews.

That leaves the six "positive" reviews. One of those positive reviews describes riders who spent 2.5 hours trying to get cinders out of their eyes... sorry, but that is not a positive review that encourages someone to ride.

We're now down to five reviews. There are several reasons why readers might doubt the authenticity of several of these reviews. One review of the railroad recommends a specific hotel; I personally discount reviews that do that because I assume the positive review was written and posted by the hotel. I would also discount the reviews that name specific employees because I figure those reviews were written by the employees named in those reviews.

Throw out the 2 reviews that could be fakes and you end up with only three of the seven reviews being positive... if you do that, the rating drops to 42%.

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Chris Webster