Originally Posted by
MicSanToro
If you are a CN Traveler reader who takes a vacation every two years and you choose to go to a resort in the Caribbean (for this example, let's pick a Sandals!), you will likely think it is the best thing ever and proceed to go give it a perfect rating for the Readers Choice Awards.
If you aren't an experienced traveler, you will be wowed by far more and proceed to rate everything 4 or 5 stars. If you are experienced, you have enough of a data set to accurately rate hotels/resorts/restaurants etc.
I'm a subscriber to CN Traveler -- and not a very experienced traveler. And for the most part, I do tend go to the Caribbean. But when I took the Readers' Choice poll, it seemed pretty flawed to me because it didn't appear to have any modeling that would compensate for the biases I have. And it didn't really give me a choice to evaluate any of the islands I go to or ask me about any of the hotels where I tend to stay.
I mean, LIAT has made some fairly significant strides to improve its general performance in the past couple of years -- rising from Panic-Attack-Inducing on my personal scale all the way up to Completely Abysmal. But I never get a chance to vote for it against JetBlue, a codeshare partner that wins All of the Awards but regularly leaves us sitting around waiting for flights to Logan from DCA or RIC whenever there's a drop of rain on the ground on the Eastern Seaboard while Delta reroutes everyone.