Polls

I’ve agreed to participate in polls for several organizations which aggregate data, mostly in the food and travel world. Today I answered one about hotels. What bugs me is that they ask which hotels I’ve stayed at in the past year but I’m not allowed to say why. If traveling with my husband for leisure, we may stay at vastly different hotels than we stayed in last year driving two cars and a dog cross-country to a new job and location. As a matter of fact there were only two hotel chains that allowed us to bring our dog and we were somewhat thankful they existed.

But doesn’t that response skew the results? How often am I going to be traipsing one-way across the USA with a dog? Yes, family and friends I get that this is a bad question given the places we’ve lived in the past ten years. And how can I say that I’m not a real fan of a certain chain but we had to be at that chain for a week before I found us a place to live and it was fantastic because one woman behind the desk was wonderful! I had to run down to Jim’s office because he forgot his badge a few weeks ago and brought the dog and we stopped en route home to visit this remarkable lady. Very few people provide that level of service. There’s no place for that in a poll.

I’m also an avid reader of and reviewer for TripAdvisor, mostly restaurants but also the occasional hotel. Both good and bad. I probably wouldn’t post restaurant comments in NYC, but out here there are a number of restaurants in a small area, then nothing for miles. As a visitor I’d like to know which restaurants have the best comments and which the worst before taking the family out for dinner.

As a kid I heard of these “Nielsen families” who got a set-top box for their tv so that the mucky-mucks at the stations knew what kind of programming sold. I thought it would be so cool to do that. Ironically it only monitored what you viewed, not what you wanted to view and we only got the three networks and PBS. So, even if I had the box I couldn’t tell them I wanted more Jacques Cousteau. If Jacques Cousteau was on I could stay up 1/2 hour beyond my bedtime and watch tv for an entire hour that day because it was educational.

Now, one is able to sway opinions not by participating in an occasional poll, but about writing about what something means to you and posting it for the world to see. As to the polls, beware what you wish for, as you might receive it. Cheers, Dee