Tripadvisor for cultural heritage

Many of you will have used Tripadvisor to select a hotel. The Tripadvisor website provides basic information on the hotel, its facilities and location, but most significantly it lets us write a review about your stay. In addition you can give it a rating. Let’s say you were traveling to Winchester and wanted to find a good hotel. Tripadvisor ranks all the reviewed hotels in the city, so you can see what was the most popular and what guests liked and more importantly didn’t like. You can then chose your hotel based on these opinions.

I guess seeing what their guests actually thought, published online, must have helped management see their hotels from a customers perspective and make appropriate improvements. Those that don’t will, presumably, suffer from falling bookings.

We’ve begun piloting a very similar web 2.0 service for visitors to Milestones Museum. Have a look at the Milestones review pages yourself. The first entry is written by someone called Ian… it wasn’t me seeding the page! Here we’re allowing museum visitors to tell us what they really thought of their visit.

Now I bet some of you are saying to yourselves ‘what if they write negative things?’ As you can see from the Milestones website, all reviews so far have been positive, and I would expect that as we operate to high standards in all our services that we ought not to receive too many negative reviews. 

So what happens if we receive a negative review? All reviews are moderated before they are published on the website, however we won’t hold any adverse criticisms back from publication if they are justified comments. We might even be able to use these to encourage improvements to the services we offer. Of course we won’t publish reviews that are clearly biased, vexatious or non family-friendly. 

The software appears to work as intended, so the next step is to roll out the functionality to all other museums managed by the department plus Winchester and Gosport Discovery Centres. Then we will add the option to all our library websites and then the remaining sites and venues.

Hampshire County Council will, I believe, be the first local authority in the UK to offer our customers the opportunity to review our services and have their comments published. It will demonstrate that we are open, honest and transparent in our  management of Hampshire’s cultural heritage. It will also support our Chartemark retention.