Hello, One of the most frustrating things about this wonderful site is that there is no way to eliminate parks by their rating. I do not care to look at parks with one, two or three stars. Marybe they are very nice, but most likely not. It also is a warning signal if a park has not had a review for four or five years. So, a suggestion for the site developers is that a selection criteria (not part of the search criteria neccessarily) be set for number of stars and years since last review. It would be a big nelp. George Istok
Although I have no problem with having search results filtered by the number of rating stars, I have no idea why you would penalize parks just because they don't have recent ratings. RVPR has no control over where its members travel nor where they stay. We would love for all parks to have lots of recent reviews but if none of our members have gone there recently that surely isn't necessarily the park's fault.
Might just be a difference of opinion, but if a park has not inspired, for what ever reason, a review in the last five years I do not want to stay there. It could be, as you suggest, that no member has stopped there. The question for me is: Why not. If the park in and area where I have an interest, then I will investigate further.
We average about 1 review for every 500 unique visitors. That isn't a great sampling. It is generally accepted that people are much more likely to post negative reviews than they are positive ones, so nice, well run parks have a smaller sample size of reviews than parks that are having problems. And when some people see that there are 30 great reviews in a row for a park, they just figure why waste people's time just repeating what has been said time and time again. Using the number of reviews as a guide is not a great idea.
I've stayed in a number of very nice parks that didn't have current reviews here, usually on the recommendation of another RV'er. In a couple of cases, the park was not even listed, so I added it. The reviews here are usually pretty good indicators of park quality, but the lack of reviews, or at least current reviews, does make them bad parks, just under reported parks. The less popular state parks particularly seem to be frequent victims of under reporting. They may be very nice parks, but because of their location may not draw a large number of non-local users that would be more likely to review them than the regulars that visit the park often. A NY state park we recently stayed at for instance, is a beautiful well maintained park with a lake and beach area that's very popular with the locals and large sites, yet we only saw two out of state license plates during our stay there. My recent review of the park is the only one listed so far this year, and there were only two reviews posted for all of last year. The next most recent review was mine from 2014. And this is a park that's fully booked for the 4th of July weekend!
Thanks for the insight. I do see your point. I have always thought it was more important to say when things went well than to point out when things were bad.
That's a great attitude and I wish more people shared it. The admins can attest to the fact that unhappy people seem far more determined than satisfied customers to let other people know how badly they were treated. Positive reviews are often tempered with statements such as, "I'd give it a higher score if it weren't for......" but negative reviews tend to focus only on how bad things were and scores of "1" are not uncommon.
And this is exactly why we encourage our members to submit a review each time they stay at a park and to even say the same things over again. It keeps that park's information up to date and verifies what the park is currently like rather than what it was like several years ago. Repeating what someone else has said confirms the previous information.
I think part of the thread sidetracked the fact that there is no filter method to give a list of CGs that fit geode's personal criteria. It is reasoneable to have a search tool that minimizes the possible overload of information now given and allows customers to identify specific starting points for CG selection. It's a more effecient, and less time consuming, path to finding a CG that would meet their needs.
There are currently 14 search criteria options in addition to the basic location choices. Perhaps the programmers can widen that selection to include rating and date limits.
