Do you do reviews? what are your thoughts on them? your experiences with them?
I am mixed on them.
I am signed up on Yelp and TripAdvisor and AirBnB and all the major hotel chains send out emails begging for reviews after a person checks out.
I tend to do Yelp to review local businesses and Trip Advisor for businesses near interstates/airports/tourist areas.
If I have a very memorable experience (good or bad) I sometimes write out a decent narrative and it strikes me as ironic that I am doing it for free (vis a vis MSing lol).
I do it as a form of payback - I use reviews all the time to help me make choices. I also do them so I can check back on my previous review to see about a repeat, There are reviews others have written that turned out to be very helpful to me. (mostly local services)
They can be effective - when an owner responds thanking you and plans to look into it (either way, just letting you know. lol)
Sometimes you get snarky or passive aggressive replies...hey I just observe what I observe. I abhor sneaky deceptive business practices, so I point those out to help others.
My stats are overwhelmingly positive...so that tells me over the years that I am much bigger on giving credit than I am airing dirty laundry. Sometimes an experience is so bad I just want to forget and never return.
I notice it's more important to me since the pandemic - each dollar I spend now comes at a higher cost.
I noticed that if you write often and a lot, Yelp will award a person a special status and invite them to events....does that compromise their objectivity? I wonder - there are businesses at these events hoping to curry favor.

Bare,

I do some reviews, but not for shops. They can, and some MSC's do, reject your shops if you leave a review on google or whatever. I recently got forked by my son, he put in a review for a shop that I did. We went through a big ole email discussion about the shop, because I did NOT do a review. But my son did, so my shop was rejected. I've been getting on him a lot lately about his need to engage and socialize with every human being he meets. He has a very tactless way of making suggestions for better service and crap that he shouldn't be commenting on anyway.

I do read reviews, especially on the debit card shops, mostly to see if the food is going to be worth the trouble. I did a pizza place recently that all the reviews said the food had recently changed to mediocre at best, and they were right. My son used to spend entire evenings running to this restaurant and delivering on doordash, now when we go up there we don't get any orders for them, and after eating a meatball calzone that I bought, I understand exactly why. The customer reviews were correct.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2025 10:43PM by Morledzep.

I don't review the types of places that I mystery shop.
I usually only review places that are independently owned - since most chain locations are nearly alike anyway.
Exception is hotels....but I have rarely shopped hotels and wouldn't review those if they were part of a shop.
I appreciate that others take the time to do reviews - helps the rest of us.

Looking back at my Google reviews (I’ve only done a few), each of them were positive reviews for independent contractors that I used. I guess at each time I felt compelled to write them a public compliment. I’ve done a lot of TripAdvisor reviews with the hope of giving others things to look out for, as if I was giving advice to a friend or relative.