Caught In The Act; Charter Pros Posting False Online Charter Reviews

By Author: Steve Austin
Total Articles: 2
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Verifying the authenticity of online yacht charter reviews isn’t that hard. Even in anonymous forum posts the publicly available electronic signature contains the where and when about the reviewer, and even more helpful is their content, context and writing style. Ten minutes of manual work will provide a good indication of authenticity. If more proof is needed, scientists are working on an algorithm to automatically detect false reviews which should be widely available soon with the ability to scan the entire web. Here’s a good example of a Charter Pro getting caught with their hand in the online review cookie jar.

Crewed Sailing Vessel (CSV) Koralia 3 (Chandler Yacht Charters, Jeanneau 53, Greece) reviewed on TripAdvisor.com. This is a painful read, four pages of forum posts (many have been removed by site administrators) that eventually confirm that Armchairsailor267 (aka. armchairsailorUk and BlackKevlar) is a representative of Chandler Yacht Charters pretending to be a past client writing a positive charter review.

The (well meaning?) Charter Pro has seriously damaged the online reputation of Chandler ...
... Yacht Charters. Reviewer “944MGM944″ also submitted a YCA Charter Scouting Report of their experience with Chandler which prompted a written demand by Chandler for YCA to remove the negative review or face legal action (YCA and the legitimate review are protected by law). I reached out to the Chandler head office in the UK and offered YCA’s Online Reputation Management services, there was no further contact. It appears now that Chandler has decided to rename their (online) charter service to Exclusive Yacht Charters Greece and on another site Compass Yacht Charters Greece. There’s no mention now of Chandler or Koralia 3 on either site – what a mess.

Steve Austin is the founder of Yacht Charter Advisor. YCA is the worldwide online Charter Sailor community for power and sail, bareboat and crewed charters, ship harbour yacht charters . The YCA Ratings and Reviews are impartial and unbiased, not handpicked or otherwise influenced by the Charter Pros.
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