London Walks' pen David Tucker continues his frank post about the business of running a walking tour company in a world of "free" tours and bogus online reviews…
(Scroll down for Part One or click HERE.)
Does London Walks get much negative
feedback?
Short answer is: not much but yes some.
And this post is an example of how we deal
with it. It has to deal with respecting our clients, hearing them and
responding as thoughtfully and intelligently as we can.
And of course it’s a completely different
ball game today. Because of – yeah, you got it – the Internet.
Somebody’s unhappy it goes straight up onto
Trip Advisor. And that’s not to mention the “malware” dimension of Trip
Advisor. The stuff unscrupulous competitors put up there. Telling lies about
you. Or lies about themselves.
And then there’s the commercial element.
Email in last week from a “firm” in Viet Nam (of all places) offering, for a
fee of course, to write a ton of five star “reviews” for our product.
Here's the email…
Or Tom – our barrister guide – being on
holiday last year in deepest England and getting in to a conversation with the
hotelier, a conversation along these lines.
And the hotelier saying, let me show you
something. And fetching from his office an email he’d been sent from some
enterprising youth saying – offering – “if you’ll pay me £100 I’ll write 40
five star reviews for your hotel on Trip Advisor. Or, if you prefer, I’ll write
40 one star reviews about your principal competitors.”
That’s the world we live in these days.
But genuine feedback, good and bad,
deserved and undeserved.
London Walks has been doing what it does
for half a century. We’ve got some perspective on these matters.
We get almost no negative stuff. And given
how easy it is to put negative stuff out there – or put it in here – that in itself is surely testimony to
the quality of the product.
But, yes, we do get a bit of it.
It falls into three categories. The first
of the three is the one that’s really important to us. As painful as it
sometimes is we value it more than the many slaps on the back – “London Walks
is the best thing since sliced bread” – the guides and the company get.
The first of the three – Numero Uno – is
somebody writing in to tell us we’ve got something wrong. And they’re being
spot on. They’re being right about it. We need to hear that . We want to hear
it. Those critics have done us a favour. Because if we are getting something
wrong we want to put it right. And we can’t put it right if we’re in the dark
about what’s going on. People who take us to task for something we’ve got wrong
are doing us a big big favour. An example? Well, years ago – back in the 1990s
– a guide developed – I’m putting this carefully – “a drink problem.” We didn’t
know about it. It was important that walkers “put us in the picture.” London
Walks and that guide went their separate ways. It was criticism. It was
painful. And it was good. End of story.
The second type can be classified as Old
Whine in New Bottles. Some people are just born complainers. And that’s ok.
That’s the world. We accept that.
We even let them “sound off” on the Walkers’ Feedback segment of www.walks.com. Be easy not to – I’m the
gatekeeper there, could slam the door in the face of their “submissions”. But I
don’t. For a couple of reasons. First of all because if you read one of those
Customers’ Feedback “forums” and it’s 100 percent over-the-moon-happy customers
you know the fix is in. That’s not a genuine “readers’ – or in our case,
walkers’ – opinion board.
Secondly,
very often that kind of thing is in fact an opportunity to sharpen the overall
perception of London Walks. A case in point just a few weeks ago. A walker’s
feedback item came in savaging Andy’s Hidden Pubs of Old London Town walk. I
wrote a lengthy, thoughtful, respectful reply. Well, turns out, that lady was
very naughty. When I talked to Andy there was of course another side to the
story. She was out of sorts. He’d
given her her money back in the first pub. As a matter of fact, when he thought
about it afterward he was pretty sure she was a pensioner and had paid £7 and
he’d “returned” £9 to her. So she came out £2 ahead. But the point is that
she’d “reviewed” a walk, having done less than 15 percent of it. And of course
she weighed in on Trip Advisor as well. That sort of stuff is dishonest, let
alone malicious. Valid, informed, fair criticism is helpful for everybody
concerned. Old Whine in New Bottles – old whine that’s ill-informed, graceless,
at bottom pretty nasty – doesn’t cut it.
The third type falls into the “we’ll have
to agree to disagree” category. People have got their view. We’ve got ours.
They can put arguments forth for theirs. We can put arguments forth for ours.
We can have – as Press Officers say about summits – a full and frank exchange
of views.
And look at this, already up to 800+ words.
So there’s going to be a Part III later today. A beef that came in. And how we
– and the guide – responded to it.
A real sample on the slide underneath the
microscope.
A London Walk costs £9 – £7 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.










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