Building an escape room requires honing many skills: thinking creatively, interior design, engineering, carpentry, lock-diameter-estimating, to name a few. One area we did NOT realize would be so challenging to navigate is what we like to call, “The Internet Jungle.” In celebration of our 50th 5-star Google review, today’s blog post will focus on a particularly dangerous portion of the internet… review sites!
If the internet is a jungle, Google is the lion, king of the Internet. Luckily, in terms of review sites, it’s a good lion like the one from Wizard of Oz and not an evil lion like Scar from The Lion King. Google is the MOST user-friendly way to leave a business a review. Since most people already have a Google account of some sort, submitting a review is quick and easy! Plus, Google aggregates other review sites so that a Google search will show the ratings of that business from across the internet. Feeling inspired? Send us some love on Google. Below are a couple of our very favorite reviews from our players on Google.
Trip Advisor
Speaking of jungle metaphors, Trip Advisor is the elephant of review sites. It blends in and moves slowly, but it is also powerful! These reviews are valuable because it is often where our players from out of town find us. We just set up a new feature on our Facebook page so players can submit TripAdvisor reviews directly from Facebook! Some of our favorites…
World of Escapes
Chimpanzees are our favorite furry friends in the jungle, just like World of Escapes is our favorite review site. Why? They’re our most closely related spirit animal! This site hosts reviews ONLY for escape rooms, and they aggregate rooms from all over the country. Although our review base here is very small (because not many people know about this site), we hope that as escape room enthusiasts grow, we will capture more reviews from our tribe! Want to be among the first? This site reviews each *ROOM* seperately, so you can share your thoughts for LIT, Inventor’s Secret, and Burned Out.
Facebook is the chameleon of review websites. It’s constantly changing. In fact, they don’t even call them “reviews” anymore. We currently have a mix of reviews grandfathered in, with some recommendations from Facebook. We have found that not many people use this feature on Facebook, so if you want to send us some love… we prefer any of the above websites! However, ALL reviews make us so happy to read! For example…
Yelp
Yelp is the snake of all review sites. As many small business owners will tell you, Yelp’s new review algorithms make it the one of sneakiest and most dangerous creatures in the jungle. We currently have over 15 reviews that are hidden from Yelp customers, because they have been labeled by Yelp as “Not Recommended.” How unfortunate these player experiences don’t get seen! Because of this, we tell our players avoid Yelp altogether and use one of the above-listed websites to give us your thoughts! In memory of Inferno Escape Room’s hidden “not recommended” 5-star reviews on Yelp…
There you have it, the adventure of navigating the online jungle of player reviews! All of these reviews are read by US, and everyone on the Inferno Escape Room team does a little dance every time we get a new review from our players. THANK YOU to everyone who has given us a shout out, let us know what you loved, and helped other people find us just a bit easier!!
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