RS travel reviews missing

RS generally does not run tours in July and August in some European countries, especially Southern Europe because of the unbearably hot temperatures. Additionally, tour participants can choose to ask RS not to publish their reviews on the website. The combination of those reasons is why you may not see many reviews.

A few years ago, pre-Covid, there was a computer glitch that prevented reviews from being uploaded. I've sent thru an email to Webmaster Andrew to call his attention to this thread and maybe have some input.

Which countries are you talking about? I just randomly check several and they had reviews from September tours.

Most of the major city tours and lots of France. I'm wondering if perhaps Covid is taking out the more urban tours and leaving travelers less the pleased.

Rphelsel: Thanks for bringing up this topic. We finished our Best of Eastern/Central Europe tour a month ago. We have not received a tour review email. Our tour as well as our guide was wonderful. I thought about asking the home office, but did not follow through.

Pam: Thanks for being proactive.

Carol, you are very welcome. I've always found the webmaster responsive and suspect he will take a look when he gets into the office on Monday.

"I'm wondering if perhaps Covid is taking out the more urban tours and leaving travelers less the pleased."

I just can't imagine this is the case. Here are the statistics from October 9:

Report date: October 9, 2023
Tours completed and on the road: 1,158
Total travelers: 30,291
Total travelers testing positive for Covid: 910 (3%)

https://www.ricksteves.com/tours/on-the-road-reports

I do NOT have any inside information but to me 900 or so people out of 30,000 is not enough to have no reviews. When you do the eval you have a choice on whether to use your eval or not as a review. While most reviews are 4 or 5 stars, there are occasionally reviews of 3 stars. I don't think the company manipulates them. I do see there are reviews of the Paris and Heart of France tour from September but also see there have been no updates on the Best of Paris tour since July.

I just posted a comment on this thread regarding the ability to opt out of having your review posted on the web. I suspect many people err on the side of not posting their answers for many reasons - one guess, your first name (not your RS forum pseudonym) is posted along with your tour date, and since the groups are so small some may be hesitant to share comments widely. Also people are busy getting on with their lives when they return from a tour. And I think survey fatigue is also quite possible - do you respond to every survey you get? I sure don't. I know there were at least seven Best of Turkey tours since the end of August and only one review is posted so far - I'm sure more will appear eventually. And FWIW, my survey went into my junk mail folder, Carol in SOregon you might check there.

I suggest contacting the RS tour office directly and provide your feedback. I personally would like to see the star ratings for every tour, not just the two comment sections. Back in the day they used to post much more detail that was a better help than what is offered now. Had I thought of it, I would have included that comment in my survey, but they have strict word limits and I had other things to say.

Hi everyone. It's purely an administrative thing. No technical problems. We don't post reviews immediately upon receiving them, and the process takes significant time.

I want to reset your expectations in that we don't collect these reviews primarily to post them for the public. That's actually the last step, as we need to process these evaluations for the sake of improving our tours and guide performance first. It's as we're doing this that we do a few things before posting to the public.

For public-facing reviews, there is a light editing step to remove any inappropriate words, we're required to keep the name of the guide anonymous (aka, we remove the guide's name), and there's a smaller list of things we look out for (such as mention of a medical condition, etc).

We read every last review every year, and as you can expect, it takes time to process them for 30,000+ tour members! So, yes, posting reviews to our website can easily be several months behind a tour's completion. "Seems like for certain countries there are no posted reviews for tours since..." This speaks to the manual process involved. Some tours have more to process, and the staff member in charge of that itinerary may e.g. have been guiding in Europe in September.

And because there's always someone who suggests this, nope, we're not pulling down negative reviews. We frankly don't have time for that sort of consideration when sorting through so many reviews, and we want readers to have realistic expectations when they go on our tours.

Thanks to everyone for their understanding. I know we're all used to immediately seeing reviews online upon writing them these days, but that's just not how it works with our tours.

Cheers!

@Webmaster, thank you so much for posting and explaining the process! I didn't realize each was added individually.

Dear Webmaster,

I personally found your response to the post on tour reviews to be inadequate. I was on the July 23 “Best of England” trip and immensely enjoyed the trip. Imagine my chagrin when I didn’t receive an email with a tour evaluation form within several weeks of the tour’s end, despite several pleas to the customer service folks to email it to me- three months later, and I’m still waiting. Your tour reviews department appears to be woefully understaffed. Why did tour reviews appear on the website within a month in previous years? Best of England tour hasn’t had a review posted in 4 months. Perhaps your evaluation process needs to be overhauled. I am disappointed that I was never given an opportunity to post a review! Hopefully, you can do better in the future.

Hi broekerd, our records show that we tried to re-send your evaluation link to you several times. We aren’t sure why it doesn’t seem to be making it through to your email account, but we appreciate any feedback you have to offer us. Let me talk with our tech department and see if we can get this sorted.

For the sake of clarity, I wish to point out that my previous post was with regard to how we process tour evaluations after they are received from tour members. It is another thing if you're not getting your tour evaluation from us at all, especially after several re-send attempts. That is an email-deliverability issue.

If you're not finding the email in your junkmail/spam folder (and the emails may have been cleared from that folder by now since it has been several months), there are other filters that can prevent delivery. M.S. will follow up privately to ensure delivery with broekerd. If there is still any issue there, you may follow up with me directly. [email protected]

Hello rphelsel!
I, too, have not received my tour review email. Neither has my travel buddy. As there haven’t been issues with this for me in the past, I’ll chalk it up to a computer glitch. Rest assured though, Rick Steves’ tours are popular for a reason - in fact, I just booked another trip yesterday, my fifth. We took a trip to Switzerland in July. To stand on a ridge in the Alps, on a bright, sunny day, with just a slight breeze, without the annoyance of bugs, and just the quiet sounds of an occasional cable car floating by ….was life altering. Magical. Every tour has these moments. Waste no more time and pick one.

We have not received our tour review email for our Best of Portugal tour 9/25-10/6 as well. Wonder what the hold up is? It was a wonderful tour and I’d hate for our reviews not to get submitted. The tour guide Fatima was amazing.

I don't have a dog in this barney, but to an outsider it sounds like a covid short staffed issue

I went on the GAS tour in late August to mid-September this year and neither I nor my spouse got a survey/evaluation emailed to us though our excellent guide, Andrea, stated we would get one.

LL you should contact the tour office directly. It's possible your survey went into your email spam folder (mine did). [email protected] or call 425-771-8303