People have asked us – why don’t we see negative posts on your website?
On our Journey Moore Often website, we have made the deliberate decision to not post negative reviews. Yet at the same time, we readily acknowledge we’ve definitely been to places that were beyond a nightmare experience.
We choose to post only positive reviews and articles about where we’ve visited and our experiences with Local Gems, and when we’re Out and About. Whenever we go somewhere with the intention of posting an article, we look for things to promote. We greatly enjoy promoting other businesses and helping them.
How we review
We at JMO don’t hesitate to share things with management if something was amiss. Nicely. We just tell them plainly without emotion what happened and await their response.
Most places understand and are more than willing to try to set things straight. One time upon sharing our thoughts with a restaurant establishment, they offered us a free dessert plus a $50 gift card. Do you think we went back? You betcha. We been back more than 4 times since then.
Sometimes there’s a back story that influences your experience. One time the owner/manager explained their situation, which, was that they truly were in a veritably terrible situation through no fault of their own.
What do we do with management that doesn’t respond well? Well, depends on the situation. Sometimes we go back to see if it was a single occurrence, sometimes we don’t. The key is how bad our experience was based on many factors we see as important.
Why we review
We’ve owned and operated more than a dozen businesses as well as having involvement in several more. Our ownership has included a restaurant, several professional business, band and real estate. From our experience, we are quite capable in helping a business resolve issues. That said, what we no longer do, is offer business suggestions. This is different from providing basic feedback.
We once had a terribly unpalatable experience while simply trying to assist a business avoid future issues. See the dedicated sections “Why we no longer offer business advice” and “What happened when we did try to help” below.
Be forewarned though. Small business owners of independent businesses tend to be the worst for receiving negative feedback. That said, most owners are fine with patrons providing feedback of their experiences. However, some can get defensive, angry and even lash out irrationally when you simply want to point out something they may want to avoid in the future. We’ve seen owners do that even when they knew they were flat out wrong.
We don’t have a problem letting them know of our bad experiences. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can review them on a website, or simply do nothing and never return.
Good reviews
When people have an exceptional experience, they tell everyone. When people have a good experience, it’s almost as if they treat the experience as something that’s expected. If we had a good time, we let people know in case they want to go there as well. Reviews can be the life’s blood of some businesses. Good reviews can matter even more.
Having a good experience should be treated as a success. Whether it’s a good meal, Broadway show, wine or beer, historic tour, hike, or event. Acknowledging the effort put into making that happen for you is important.
Most of the time we look for places that we feel confident that we’ll have a good time. As a result, it’s rare when we don’t. Or if something goes wrong, it’s usually fairly minor.
Bad reviews
Everyone talks about what went wrong. They don’t even hesitate to tell everyone they know. That’s why most businesses work so hard to make their customer’s experience a positive memorable experience.
We’ve been to enough places to understand that sometimes things happen. Sometimes people just have a bad day.
Sometimes we have unrealistic expectations. This is the tough one. Both realizing, then acknowledging that something we expected was never even possible.
Managing your expectations is critical to your experience. It’s best to research the venue ahead of time to know what to expect. Looking at online reviews or talking to personal friends you’ll get a better understanding of where you’re headed.
Restaurants tend to hear the most when it comes to complaining. People who are used to going for all-you-can-eat salad and bread, or the never ending pastas at Olive Garden should not expect the same at a more upscale restaurant. It costs more to produce upscale restaurant food. Plus it’s more complicated. And realistically, 99% of us don’t need that much caloric intake anyway.
Essentially when you go to a greasy spoon, don’t expect to receive anywhere close to the extraordinary service, food, and atmosphere at a place like Vetri Cucina Restaurant.
But it’s more than that. We shouldn’t get upset with a venue (restaurant, theatre, etc.) if we didn’t plan on finding parking and we end up late. Or show up in a sun dress to go sky diving and be upset that they won’t let you participate.
Most of managing our expectations is pure common sense mixed in with some upfront research of where we headed.
Why we no longer offer business advice
Through no fault of our own, we had an incredibly bad experience at a place. We were shocked as we’d previously had fun at that location more than a dozen times. It was a result of their policy that didn’t affect us previously. When it did come up, we made it clear (several times) we were willing to abide by by the policy. Despite our concerns, they decided it was OK for our group to break their policy. They even set it up in a way to provide an acceptable rationale, for themselves. Then…in the middle of our event, they changed their mind and literally reversed their decision. In a not so nice way (pretty rudely in fact), they decided to enforce their policy, significantly negatively impacting our entire group. We ended up having to leave their venue in the middle of the event.
As you might have already figured, we haven’t been back since.
This was a place we’d frequented a lot and had even brought a lot of people there over a period of several years. More than once our group had spent several hundred dollars there in one day.
What happened when we did try to help
The biggest mistake we made was trying to help them avoid having this happen to them in the future. That turned out even more disastrous as the business owner did not seem interested in improving their relations with the public. We tried to get beyond our own hurt and assist with their protocols. What we encountered was that they were quite hostile and even threatening when we were just trying to help them.
In the process of trying to help them, we discovered that we were not the only ones to get kicked out as a result of their inconsistent policy enforcement.
Go figure they continue to have the same problem even today. In checking Yelp on their page afterwards, several people mentioned they had the same problem. Their track record highlights that it’s 1) it’s a real issue for their location, and 2) pretty clear their not interested in resolving this issue.
Looking for a JMO article?
What do you do if you know we’ve been somewhere, but haven’t seen a write up? There are only two reasons why we’ve been somewhere and we didn’t post an article:
- We haven’t gotten around to it. We’re very sorry about that. We typically have no less than 2 dozen articles in various stages in the queue.
- Our experience there wasn’t that good.
If you’re that curious, check to see if we we’ve already written a Yelp or TripAdvisor review. Chances are if it’s negative (or positive), it’s written up there. If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to contact us directly via email to see if we just haven’t gotten around to it yet.