Yelp Reviews

The following are reviews that customers have posted on Yelp.com. When a new review is posted on Yelp.com, we display it here as well because any positive review will almost certainly be filtered from our Yelp rating within 48 hours.
Yelp claims that their automated software that makes the recommendation selections is unbiased. The Yelp video that explains their recommendation software (complete video found here) says "...every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp's recommendation software based on quality, reliability and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community. Our recommendation software is looking for reviews from people whose opinions, positive or negative, we feel are helpful and reliable to consumers. Currently about 75% of reviews are recommended. We try not to highlight reviews by users we don't know much about, those that might be fakes, or rants and raves. Reviews that Yelp doesn't recommend can still be seen via a link at the bottom of each businesses profile page but they don't factor into the businesses overall Yelp star rating or review count...".
Goldrush Getaways has 205 reviews on Yelp (as of October 18th, 2021), 131 of which are recommended. That means 64% of our reviews (131/205) are "recommended", which has come up from 54% since 2016, but is still not in line with the 75% that Yelp says are recommended overall (quoted in paragraph above). Also, 63 of our 90 one star reviews are factored in to our Yelp rating and are recommended; 70% of all our one star reviews are recommended, which is 11% higher than our overall review recommendation percentage. Of the recommended one star reviews, 36 of the 63 (or 57%) have zero, one or two friends and less than 5 reviews; not exactly the active Yelpers that the video suggests is what Yelp looks for to recommend a review. Also, many of these one star reviews date back to 2012 or 2013, so those reviews stick around while newer and more relevant reviews are filtered. We have 77 five star reviews of which 41 are recommended. That means only 53% of our five star reviews are recommended, which is much lower than the overall 64% of total reviews and the 70% one star recommended review percentages. The math is clearly still slanted against us, so we feel the need to point out the imbalance of our recommended reviews.
We don't feel that Yelp is out to get us. We just want everyone to be aware that Yelp filters customer reviews with an automated system, Yelp recommends reviews that Goldrush Getaways can prove contain false information, and that Yelp recommends reviews without verifying claims made by the reviewer. Yelp is permitted by law to allow someone to libel our company on their website. Yelp will not take down a review purely based on a false claim as their response is that they don't take sides. As a small business, all we can do is reply to the review, which is at least visible to the public. It appears that Yelp thinks a review from over 9 years ago from a person that received a marketing mailer but never even visited our business, has no friends (on Yelp) and only 1 review is more credible that a review from yesterday from one of our actual members that has been a customer for years. We only ask that you keep all of this information in mind. We welcome both positive and negative feedback from the public and our members. We view negative feedback as an opportunity to learn and to improve our product and our service. Thank you.
Yelp does say that reviews change over time. We have seen a slight improvement over the past two years, so we are confident that time will rectify the current imbalance.