What Are Your Pet Peeves Rv'ing?

QUOTE(Lindsay Richards @ Apr 23 2013, 07:58 AM) [snapback]33168[/snapback]

Terminology is a moving target in the RV business. Resort is a really abused term too. Since when is a parking lot a resort.



Oh, yeah...."resort".....that's a good one. Add the word "resort" to your name and you can charge an extra 15 dollars a night. We've stayed in "resorts" that had no pool, no clubhouse, etc. but, by dang, THEY WERE RESORTS! One place even charged a $3 per day "resort fee" for absolutely nothing - no pool, gameroom was locked the entire time we were there, laundromat was a disaster, you couldn't swim in the lake, and the store was open only a couple hours a day.

And then there are the places that have an ungodly number of rules. Now, I'm all for rules and I'm a rule-abiding person, even if I don't agree with the particular rule. But, one place we stayed a couple of years ago had the most unbelievable number of rules that covered about anything you could do or even THINK about doing. The RULES were posted everywhere and I mean EVERYWHERE. We hadn't even come to a complete stop before the owner's wife roared up in a golf cart and informed us of a couple of rules we had already broken that we didn't even know about yet. Best yet, they offered "free nights" to people who ratted on their neighbors.....this was stated in the 3-page list of "rules". It was a good park, but at times I felt like I was in Stalag 17, especially when the owner's wife would slowly drive around the park all day, stopping at each site to have a good look to make sure you weren't breaking any of the rules.

 

Ok, I have a new peev which you park owners woulld appreciate: people who rate their stay lower, due to items completely out of control of the park. I just read a review that said: "I'm sure this park is quite nice in the spring, but when we were there it was cold and rainy which brought down the score."

So park owners, on top of providing good wi-fi, clean bathrooms, good hook ups, and big-rig friendly sites, you also have to make sure the weather is favorable!

 

QUOTE(Fitzjohnfan @ Apr 24 2013, 01:05 AM) [snapback]33184[/snapback]

Ok, I have a new peev which you park owners woulld appreciate: people who rate their stay lower, due to items completely out of control of the park. I just read a review that said: "I'm sure this park is quite nice in the spring, but when we were there it was cold and rainy which brought down the score."

So park owners, on top of providing good wi-fi, clean bathrooms, good hook ups, and big-rig friendly sites, you also have to make sure the weather is favorable!


We are also responsible for birds pooping on vehicles, lady bugs, and all other normal insect populations.

 

QUOTE(docj @ Apr 23 2013, 09:44 AM) [snapback]33173[/snapback]

I think it is amazing that you would recognize this CG as the one we were at! :lol:

We did stay at a KOA in Flagstaff that used boulders for the same purpose, but the one in Wilsonville was the one with the steel posts.

Did you also notice that no one had a single thing outside their RVs? I recognize the weather is still cool in OR but there wasn't a single chair visible outside near any RV. Personally, I found it a bit spooky, in a Stepford Wives way.



I think that the biggest reason that most folks stay inside their rigs at this place is because there isn't room outside. I was there a couple of years ago in October but the weather was warm and would have loved to have been outside. There was room on the pad for my coach and toad but not much else. Once you are off the pad the ground sloped so badly that you couldn't walk along the side of your rig. I had a little bit of space to set up my grill between the coach and the Jeep and that was all.

We usually go for a walk to check a park out and chat with other campers. We too noticed that this place appeared empty even though there were quite a few spaces taken.

This park still gets high ratings. We stayed there because of the reviews. Unfortunately, I didn't "read" them. I just looked at their numbers. Sadly, all of the parks short comings were listed but mentioned in different posts. I now take the time to read reviews.

Again, I'm glad you made it out of the park safely.

Darrell

 

QUOTE(Fitzjohnfan @ Apr 24 2013, 01:05 AM) [snapback]33184[/snapback]

Ok, I have a new peev which you park owners woulld appreciate: people who rate their stay lower, due to items completely out of control of the park. I just read a review that said: "I'm sure this park is quite nice in the spring, but when we were there it was cold and rainy which brought down the score."

So park owners, on top of providing good wi-fi, clean bathrooms, good hook ups, and big-rig friendly sites, you also have to make sure the weather is favorable!



What I've noticed is that often when there is a legitimate problem--maybe there was a dispute over the reservation or the price quoted or the front desk person wasn't as friendly as they could have been, etc.--the reviewer gets mad and then purposely looks for and “piles on" every other little thing that they can possibly find that is wrong with the park. If the one and only problem had not occurred, they probably would not have even noticed or mentioned anything else.

 

QUOTE(Lindsay Richards @ Apr 23 2013, 07:58 AM) [snapback]33168[/snapback]

Terminology is a moving target in the RV business. Resort is a really abused term too. Since when is a parking lot a resort.



re·sort
/riˈzôrt/
Noun

A place that is a popular destination for vacations or recreation, or which is frequented for a particular purpose.

 

Long time lurker, 1st time poster. hello all!

I've had a good time reading this thread, mostly just saying 'Yeah! Me, too!' LOL

I think I can sum up my pet peeve in just one. One that might take care of a lot of yours, too.


Park/Campground owners/security/host that do not or will not enforce their own basic rules. I don't mean they have to be the Gestapo over one dropped candy wrapper or radio that is a wee bit loud during the day, but if a camper complains to you that their neighbors are too loud during quiet time, their kids are running all over your site, or they repeatedly don't clean up after their pet please don't ask us to tell the camper ourselves. We're pretty laid back (really, we are) and most of the time we don't mind the little things that go along with sharing a public space, but there is a definite line between being able to just roll your eyes at your neighbor and carry on and things that are just way out of line and need to be addressed by the people 'in charge'.

But then again, as my Grandma used to say:

"I know my faults are many,
My neighbor has but two.
Everything they say,
And everything they do".

 

QUOTE(FosterImposters @ Aug 8 2012, 12:48 AM) [snapback]30403[/snapback]

Rude folks captures it for us as well.
Am usually out in the great outdoors to get a break from these people: in the office, on the roadways, in the store, in the stands behind me at a grandchild's game...

 

QUOTE(QueenofQuitealot @ May 27 2013, 11:56 AM) [snapback]33592[/snapback]

Long time lurker, 1st time poster. hello all!

I've had a good time reading this thread, mostly just saying 'Yeah! Me, too!' LOL

I think I can sum up my pet peeve in just one. One that might take care of a lot of yours, too.
Park/Campground owners/security/host that do not or will not enforce their own basic rules. I don't mean they have to be the Gestapo over one dropped candy wrapper or radio that is a wee bit loud during the day, but if a camper complains to you that their neighbors are too loud during quiet time, their kids are running all over your site, or they repeatedly don't clean up after their pet please don't ask us to tell the camper ourselves. We're pretty laid back (really, we are) and most of the time we don't mind the little things that go along with sharing a public space, but there is a definite line between being able to just roll your eyes at your neighbor and carry on and things that are just way out of line and need to be addressed by the people 'in charge'.

But then again, as my Grandma used to say:

"I know my faults are many,
My neighbor has but two.
Everything they say,
And everything they do".



Hello to all,
I signed on to this forum because I own an RV campground. This thread caught my interest. QueenofQuitealot's post especially hit home.
I was informed that a recent lady "tagalong" camper wrote a bad review about our campground on this site. Her 6-7 year old son first was 13 sites from his site without mom riding a bicycle in another campers site. Crashed into a folding cage with their two small dogs in it then came with in an inch of scratching the side of a $50,000.00 pickup truck. I had to tell him to get out of the site and ride in the driveway.
Within ten minutes I was informed that he was doing a tight rope walk on top of the swing set 8 feet above ground. I went and immediately told him to get down, go up to his site and that he was not welcome at the play ground without his parents. Children must be supervised at all times is listed in our"basic rules" we give to all campers. I then went to the site to tell the parents what happened. Sitting a the site was one man one woman. I told them the boy was not allow in the playground without a parent. He indicated that his wife was down there. I said there was a woman sitting there that did utter a word when I was tell the boy to leave and he better get down there to see what is going on with her. As it turned out the tagalong woman was the mother of boy. When I said it was a boy named C----- she proceed to to jump me about being polite. I was polite until they sat there non-responsive and had to almost demand that he go check.
So as I see it I was trying to enforce our"basic rules" and now I am the jackass.
We built this campground eleven years ago. We have had hundreds of guests and hundreds of kids. This is the first time I have had to come down on anyone.
Web sites like this give these misguided "keyboard warriors" an avenue to vent founded or unfounded.
By the way my use of "tagalong" camper means that she was with the couple that rented the site. We charge $2.00 per night for extra adults. We collected $6.00 for her and now we have to deal with this.

 

We were in the lodging business for a decade and idiots like this can really hurt you. This site will listen and possibly remove the bogus review. With places like trip adviser, you are stuck. You can write a rebuttal, but that sometimes does more harm than good. Places like Trip Adviser are there strictly for the clickthrus and making money. I would suggest if the review shows up here to get in touch with webmaster and see what can be done.

 

QUOTE(Lindsay Richards @ Jun 5 2013, 12:03 PM) [snapback]33708[/snapback]

Places like Trip Adviser are there strictly for the clickthrus and making money. I would suggest if the review shows up here to get in touch with webmaster and see what can be done.



I'd be interested in why you are so down on TripAdvisor. We rarely use it for campground recommendations because it has very few, but we rely on it for "things to do" and restaurant recommendations. I personally have contributed over 200 reviews in 129 cities. I find that its reviews are no better or worse than those for this site; I usually read several and form a "consensus" view of a place. I don't think we have ever gone to a highly rated "thing to see" and left totally disappointed. It has also helped us find "unusual" places to visit such as quilting museums in Lincoln NE and La Conner WA, the latter being a place that probably never would have made it into a conventional travel site or the POI list in a GPS.

 

QUOTE(Texasrvers @ Apr 24 2013, 11:26 AM) [snapback]33188[/snapback]

What I've noticed is that often when there is a legitimate problem--maybe there was a dispute over the reservation or the price quoted or the front desk person wasn't as friendly as they could have been, etc.--the reviewer gets mad and then purposely looks for and “piles on" every other little thing that they can possibly find that is wrong with the park. If the one and only problem had not occurred, they probably would not have even noticed or mentioned anything else.

 

Ok, I have a new peev which you park owners woulld appreciate: people who rate their stay lower, due to items completely out of control of the park. I just read a review that said: "I'm sure this park is quite nice in the spring, but when we were there it was cold and rainy which brought down the score."

So park owners, on top of providing good wi-fi, clean bathrooms, good hook ups, and big-rig friendly sites, you also have to make sure the weather is favorable!


QUOTE(Texasrvers @ Apr 24 2013, 11:26 AM) [snapback]33188[/snapback]

What I've noticed is that often when there is a legitimate problem--maybe there was a dispute over the reservation or the price quoted or the front desk person wasn't as friendly as they could have been, etc.--the reviewer gets mad and then purposely looks for and “piles on" every other little thing that they can possibly find that is wrong with the park. If the one and only problem had not occurred, they probably would not have even noticed or mentioned anything else.


I know I'm replying to an old post but are you saying it's acceptable to downgrade a campground because the traffic was bad today. Are we supposed to dissect each review to determine what the reviewers real problem was.
It seems to me that if the reviews are not honest and objective, yet still go unchallenged the whole process is without merit.

 

I think quite a few people would agree with you on this. There are, unfortunately, too many instances of reviewers complaining about things totally irrelevant to a review of a CG and often completely out of its control. Reviewers complain about the winds in west TX (duh??); that it rained every day they stayed at a place; that a CG associated with a casino was next to a casino; etc, etc.

All you can do is laugh and, in your mind, discount the value and credibility of those reviews. I'm sure the moderators of this site try to limit this sort of thing, but I suspect it would be unmanageable if they started to challenge a significant percentage of the reviews over issues such as

You gave this CG a "3" rating but most of your issues seem to relate to not having been able to see many birds during your visit to the nearby bird sanctuary. Would your rating of the CG been higher if they had been able to rustle up more birds? Do you think it's the CG's fault that you didn't see any? Please re-evaluate your rating. :lol:

With the large volume of reviews submitted to this website, IMHO such a dialog, even though possibly beneficial in the long run, would require a much larger forum admin staff and could easily result in acrimonious debate. I think the site is better off relying on other people to use common sense when reading such reviews.

 

We were in the lodging business for 10 years. We were there for the beginning of the review era. Trip adviser is one of the survivors. There was a tremendous level of cheating. There were in the form of owners making rave reviews about themselves and horrible reviews about their competitors. It got to a very bad level. We figured about 70% of the reviews were bogus. We had one guy in town that even accidentally used his own email. You can get an email in about a minute. He told a friend of mine about what he had said about my place and I stopped him by telling him I would kick his @ss if he did it again. He still wrote bad reviews about other places. They started using host masks so they could tell the provider and that is easily gotten around by using different computers. Now the trick used by many in the B and B business is to send a guest you think will write a good review an email with a link to the right page so they can gloat on your place. Not really on the up and up. It is too bad that this happens. Trip Advisor wasn't too interested in fixing it. I take their reviews with a grain of salt. I still look at the reviews in my old town and the cheating is going strong. The more reviews they have, the more click through they have and the more money they make. Their awards programs for lodging properties are a stick scam. You buy your rewards with cash. They are not picked by the customers. In times of a bad economy, the urge to cheat becomes even greater.

 

Since I have only used TripAdvisor once for hotel lodging, I have to assume everything you say is correct. However, I don't believe the same thing is true for the Things To Do listings or, for that matter, for restaurants. Many of the "things to do" are museums, parks, not-for-profits, etc, that wouldn't be playing in the game you describe. Maybe some restaurant reviews are planted, but most seem to be rather genuine.

 

I believe many of the restaurant reviews are bogus also. Notice that when there is a bad one, there are quickly 4 or 5 very good ones to move it down the list. What I do is look at the following ones and see if they had done other reviews. Frequently, the glowing ones were their first. This site requires 3 reviews before posting any. The sad truth is that if an owner wants to be sneaky, it is very hard to stop them. It is almost impossible to tell by reading a review if it is quinine or not. We usually read quite a few reviews and throw out the top and bottom ones.