Review Websites & Coach Hire Comparison

I was looking at a number of review sites this week for general market research and a few things really struck me. 

1. It is amazing how many company generated reviews are live on the websites, customers always complain about service and praise people.  Talking about business models and over elaborate descriptions are a sure sign of spam. 

2. The companies providing the review websites make a big noise about the usefulness of reviews but don't take any real care about where the reviews are coming from. 

3. How useful are the reviews? We often find that the reviews are from both extremes, very happy or very unhappy but 80% of the customers get a satisfactory service and don't feel the need to talk about it. 

4. It is said that happy customers will generally tell one person and unhappy customers tell 8-16 people; so the simple maths give you an idea of the distortion people see on review sites. 

Customers are making decisions based on a small percentage of people making a lot of noise. 

So we have a market open to exploitation by business, full of spam and one that is distorted by a small group of people making a lot of noise. 

CoachCompare.Com only collects coach hire reviews for customers we know have actually booked a coach trip with the company.  We also make sure that the overall score reflects the customer feedback but that the review is useful for the customer. 

So when customers use CoachCompare.Com they can compare coach hire companies on service, price and quality. 

Face lift of CoachCompare.Com

We have just released a new version CoachCompare.Com.

There are a number of performance improvements and a few bug fixes. But the most noticeable change is a visual cleanup.

We have worked hard to make the visuals more consistent and a bit fresher. Also, the unreliable popup dialog has been replaced with a fancybox plugin.

Here are some impressions:

Customers Need Quality Coach Hire Reviews

I have just had to write a letter complaining about the quality of the reviews on Review Centre.

Competitors have been going to the site and filling it full of spam to try and reduce the average quality score and to attack the brands of coach companies.

This is the problem with the open review system that Review Centre and the likes of Trip Adviser use, the reviews are distorted by spam and people who just like shouting.

On CoachCompare.Com we only publish coach hire reviews from real customers, people we know have actually booked coach hire with our affiliate companies.

It is not that we have a problem with open forums but the publishers of these forums need to make sure that they either edit, allow brands the right of reply or verify the booking in some way.

If something is not done about the issue users will work out  that the reviews are useless and get bored of the sites.

Now in tribute to spam a little piece of Monty Python