The only thing I find concerning is that TA presents (at present) an unbalanced picture.
In this case, 82 of 83 reviews (all but one) gave the highest possible rating. No matter how good an organization can be, when you get to this magnitude of sample size, such a response is statistically unlikely, because it's effectively a zero variance.
The number of good reviews possessed by a dive op is much more a measure of their marketing abilities than of the quality of service.
Understood, and given also that in this specific example, the company responded on TA within 24 hours, which shows that they're very much "plugged in" to the existence of TA, and to its business potential.
It's not (necessarily) that bad dive ops are drumming up good reviews for themselves. It's that some very good dive ops which don't play the TA review game will have few or no reviews and get overlooked. Eventually, EVERY dive op will be forced to start pestering customers for reviews in order to survive.
For better ... and for worse, unfortunately. To be fair, we can't blame the businesses who have found opportunity through such means. But by the same token, we are still allowed to be cynical.
It also looks to me as if many (although not all) of the TA reviewers have very limited diving experience to begin with. Perhaps the reviews would carry more weight if the reviewer was required to state how many dives he/she has done and whether the review was solicited or not.
There is nothing wrong with inexperienced divers posting reviews. MOST divers (perhaps I should say holders of diving certifications cards?) are relatively inexperienced. For a new diver, the opinions of other new divers may be just what they are looking for.
Within limits. One big problem is that such "inexperienced" are prone to basically the same problem that we have in diving with feedback on Instructors: all novices invariably claim that theirs was the best guy in the world, since they all have had a sample size of n=1 and thus, no real baseline with which to compare against.
I do agree that some measure of the poster's experience would help me gauge how well an operation might be able to cater for divers with a similar skill set to me.
Agreed, and to that end, it was worth noting that the sole "3" (average) vote was from a reviewer who self-identified themselves as a group of experienced (4+ years) to highly experienced (25+ years) diving consumers. IMO, this comment carries substantially more weight. Unfortunately, Trip Advisor isn't really in the position to try to measure their self-selected volunteer reviewers, which is a weakness of their polling system.
Thus, for the rest of us, the Devil remains in the details on how to interpret the TA reports.
-hh
