Have you booked the vacation based on the photos of the place and a 4 Star rating and been disappointed? You know the room was nice but the hotel or cottage was situated in a ghastly setting. Or the place was OK but the service sucked? How do we find our vacation places? We now go online. What do we find? A Potemkin Village of puffery. A world of travel writing that is run by the operators and a world of rating that is based on bureaucrats.
Now on PEI, thanks to Steve Garrity of silverorange we have WikiPEI - a wiki site that will allow us to record our actual experience. You the potential visitor to PEI will have a resource that you can trust. You will give each other your view of what your time here was really like. I as an owner of a property for rent will also be able to get out from under a rating system that is based on a set of values that have the opposite sensibility to my place and the kind of visitor that seeks a complete rest.
Setting in the government system means nothing. So your cottage can be in a field with no landscape and this does not count for the rating. Inside the building, ratings are driven by criteria worked out by people who have been no where and done nothing. Quaint bourgeois ideas such as headboards drive a star and to get 5 stars you have to have heavy wallpaper - my property is a converted barn and is all wood. Imagine heavy wall paper in a barn!
The rating system drives huge costs - about 20% of my gross. As an operator I have to shell out money left and right to regulators. With WikiPEI if you like my place, you will tell me and more important you will tell other visitors. That is the regulation that counts. The voice of the customer is what we need not some gang of bureaucrats.
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