[ActiveCaptain]

I'm glad that Jeff mentioned St Augustine Municipal marina, because that is an excellent example of a schilling problem developing with ActiveCaptain.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "schilling". I mean, I definitely know what the word means. But do you think this is happening in a large and general way in ActiveCaptain? I know that it isn't.

I just recently was at a rendezvous at the St. Augustine Municipal Marina. I've had the luxury of being there before but I read all of the reviews prior to arriving. At that time there were 19 reviews and 12 of them mentioned something about the current. Even if I hadn't been there before, that would have made it obvious that current is a definite issue at this location.

So we arrived the afternoon before our reservation, anchored just to the south and waited until slack tide the next day. I called the marina and asked them to give me the best time to arrive - we have a fairly large boat with a deep draft and it is most surely pushed by current. They picked the time and met our boat as I was backing into the slip. Life was good. A similar thing happened when we left. Bottom line - by reading the reviews we avoided the issue and had a fantastic time - we stayed for a week. Their facilities are exceptional and the staff is one of the best, most helpful I've ever encountered. Do you think someone paid me for my review or that I'm padding it in some way? Would you like some references to 1 star reviews I've given to marinas? I've given very, very few 5 star reviews to marinas. Something has to be very special about it in my mind. St. Augustine definitely fit that requirement.

One thing that we do is provide the number of "points" a captain has next to every review they post. When you see a five star rating and 10 points (like one of the reviews out of the 21 for St. Augustine) I'd put very little belief that the review is real. But looking through the other reviews, I just don't see happening in a general way. I believe that the community fixes things like that and I've seen it happen many times.

So do marinas put glowing reviews for themselves at times? Yes, I'm sure some do. I'd prefer if they made it obvious that it was the marina writing the review but I doubt most do that. We just completed an article for the July/August issue of Marina DockAge magazine talking about this exact thing. Some marinas think they're being clever by creating a fake user. Ultimately it doesn't work for long.