VR Zone™ Rating

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MyVRZone has developed a rating system for Vacation Rentals based upon a standard set of questions that can be completed securely by the guest directly or by the owner.

What does the rating mean?

The system provides a rating from 1 to 5 Zones, where 5 is best, 1 is worst and 3 is the expected rating:

- Excellent / Much better than expected
- Good / Better than expected
- OK / Met expectations
- Poor / Should have been better
- Very Poor / Not acceptable

Other symbols that you may see:

- Secure feedback directly from the guest, the owner cannot edit these. This is a good sign.
† - More than 5% of the ratings are not published. Ask the owner why.

When viewing a particular property rating on a website you will see the average of all the ratings for that property. Placing your mouse cursor over the rating will bring up a box that breaks down this average rating into ratings for each of the questions asked (see next section).

What is actually rated?

There are 5 questions that are each rated as above:

• Property meeting the advertised description?
  How well did the description of the property, its amenities and the local area match with reality?
• Cleanliness of the property on arrival?
  You should expect to find your property clean on arrival.
• Reservation procedure and communications?
  How were your dealings with those taking your initial reservation and then dealing with ongoing communications and anything post-reservation? Were your questions answered, and in a reasonable timeframe? Were the written and verbal communications clear?
• Dealings with any local property manager?
  Every property has issues from time-to-time. If any occurred during your stay were they taken care of quickly and to your satisfaction (bear in mind that non-emergencies at the weekend may reasonably be left until the following week). Were the people you dealt with on the issue courteous and professional?
• Information/Directions provided before trip?
  Did you get enough information before/during your trip to ensure that you got to the property OK and were able to operate items inside?
• Would you recommend this property to others?
  Simple Yes or No.

When looking at the over all rating, the box showing the details when you place your mouse cursor over the rating displays the average from each of these questions over all responses.

How is the rating entered?

Ideally, the guest completes the owner's online feedback form (supplied by myvrzone.com) after their stay and enters the rating there - this is done securely and cannot be edited by the owners. When this occurs, an individual rating is annoted with a lock symbol. If more than 75% of the feedback is directly from a guest then the over all rating is also annoted with the lock symbol

Alternatively, the owner may enter the rating themselves based upon feedback they obtained from the guest in a different way. Such ratings are not annoted with the lock symbol.

How is this rating system good for the owner and the guest?

There are 2 issues with any feedback system: abuse by the owner and abuse by the guest.

Preventing abuse by owners

Unscrupulous owners may enter glowing feedback ratings from fictitious guests or choose not to include ratings that are poor in order to keep their average rating high.

This system provides 2 mechanisms for dealing with this:

• Too many owner-entered ratings: The lock symbol is used to indicate that over 75% of the ratings are directly from a guest. Such ratings have been securely entered or approved by the guest and the owner cannot change them. If you see the lock symbol then that is a good sign that the rating is genuine. NOTE that if the lock symbol is not there this does not mean that the rating is necessarily false.
• Non-publishing of ratings: Owners have the option of not including some guest ratings in their over all rating. There can be genuine reasons for this (see guest abuse below) but it should not happen much of the time. If the owner has chosen to publish less than 95% of their ratings then the system will add a †symbol to the rating display and include a note in the the mouse-over pop-up summary. If you see this symbol then the owner may be getting a lot of negative feedback - or they have just not published the ones they have received yet. Talk to them and ask them to publish the ratings.

Preventing abuse by guests

Sometimes a guest may have a bad experience in one aspect of the rating and instead of just entering a poorer rating there they may rate the other aspects more poorly as well. On other occasions a guest may rate everything as very poor in order to punish the owner for something that happened (which may or may not have been under the control of the owner).

When this happens, the owner can choose to not publish the rating - but are limited in how many they can withold before this shows up with the † warning symbol as per the Non-publishing of ratings above.