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 134 reviews on Yelp (as of November 9th, 2016), 72 of which are recommended. That means 54% of our reviews (72/134) are "recommended", which is not in line with the 75% that Yelp says are recommended overall (quoted in paragraph above). Also, 45 of our 62 one star reviews are factored in to our Yelp rating and are recommended; 72% of all our one star reviews are recommended, which is 18% higher than our overall review recommendation percentage. Of the recommended one star reviews, 19 of the 45 (or 42%) 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 those are over 2 years old, so those reviews stick around while newer reviews are ignored. We have 51 five star reviews of which 17 are recommended. That means only 33% of our five star reviews are recommended, which is much lower than the overall 54% and the 72% one star recommended review percentages. The math is clearly slanted against us, so we feel the need to point out the imbalance of our recommended reviews. Yelp does say that reviews change over time, so we are confident that time will rectify the current imbalance. Currently, of our 72 recommended reviews Yelp uses 45 one star reviews in our rating (which is 62%).
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. It appears that Yelp is protected by law to allow someone to libel our company and Yelp will not take down a review purely based on a false claim. We can only reply to the review, which is at least visible to the public. It appears that Yelp thinks a review from over 1 year ago from a person that didn't even visit 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. 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.