In past tour years I have usually relied on the Reviews posted on the Our Tours site for individual tours. But, this year they have been lagging way behind. Perhaps it’s a staffing issue in the Edmonds office……. Regardless it’s really informative to hear travelers’ experiences. Thanks for taking the time to share!
Posted by
Used to be Steilacoom, now it’s Las Vegas
2296 posts
It may be that people are not submitting their reviews. I didn’t do mine for our tour that ended May 20th until yesterday. Life intruded in a big way after I returned and it didn’t make its way up my “to-do” list until yesterday. The one I wrote for our first tour posted pretty quickly. The webmaster mentioned that they are using a new group for collecting the reviews, so that may be causing an impact as well. It’s nice to know those reviews are helpful to others.
Posted by
Wisconsin
135 posts
I tried to submit a tour review but was interrupted halfway through filling it out. I thought I could go back and finish it, but when I did it said my window had closed. I wasn’t able to submit a review. It was positive though.
Posted by
franktown, colorado
2252 posts
I’m adding thanks for the terrific tour reports that have been posted here, too.
Anne, I had almost the same experience. The site told me basically that i was too late to submit a tour review. That said, I had a wonderful time on our Eastern France tour that ended May 21. It was exactly as wonderful as I had hoped it would be and then some! Great itinerary, lots of lovely small(er) towns, nice hotels, fantastic mountain scenery, great food, wonderful wines and a guide who outdid herself to make this tour the best ever for all of us! Thank you, Chris C.! Everyone who was leaving for home around the same time we did tested negative and Chris went above and beyond to locate and then walk with us to a pharmacy that could and would test us on a Sunday for an early Monday morning flight. I highly recommend this tour to anyone. It’s not just all about the wine and hopefully, I will get around to writing a whole trip report to post here! Definitely a ***** tour overall..
Posted by
Edmonds, WA, USA
1016 posts
We have very few tours running Feb-April for most itineraries. May is the first big month of the year, and it's only early June. To give you a sense for what needs to happen, the tour has to run to completion, emails sent X days after, reviews completed Y days after that, then a staffer needs to come along to check the review to ensure it meets some basic standards before publishing to the internet (e.g. no swearing, ensure that it's approved by the tour member to publish, etc)... and of course, evaluate if the review indicates something needs to change with the tour and follow up on that, etc. And it does take plenty of staff time to work through thousands of reviews.
To set realistic expectations, I wouldn't expect to see many 2022 reviews for any given itinerary until July/August. Thanks for your patience!
Posted by
OP
51 posts
Thank you for the information and update WebMaster
Posted by
Edmonds, WA, USA
1016 posts
I tried to submit a tour review but was interrupted halfway through
filling it out. I thought I could go back and finish it, but when I
did it said my window had closed. I wasn’t able to submit a review. It
was positive though.
We're just starting to get a sprinkling of this sort of report. It's something that we couldn't reproduce in our own testing of the new system before its launch a few months ago, but we know it's happening now. We're moving quickly to re-engage our vendor on this issue, signing SOWs, etc. In other words, we're working hard to get this fixed, and I don't have a timeframe for when this will be done.