www.CostaRicaTicas.com

The Jaco Beach Hotel Morgan's Cove and the Poseidon get contradictory reviews on Trip advisor.
Some say clean rooms. Others say really dirty rooms. About three give Morgan's cove 2 stars. One saying big gaps under doors with termites and spiders and bad food. Yet many others give 3-5 stars and say the food is good and the rooms are clean. Some people complained that at both they can run out of hot water.

What have your guys experience been..?

Maybe I should stick to Sportsman's in town. When I stayed I had a newly renovated room.

My experience is that Trip Advisor is full of shit.

It can be. There is someone who says that there are people who write TripAdvisor reviews for a living, which is why there are all these marginal shitholes with glowing reviews. There could be truth to that.

My experience is different. I know every person that wrote every TripAdvisor review in the last 18 months for our Lodge. Those are honest reviews.

Where there is a wide range of reviews? Well, nobody is getting paid to write the bad ones. Sometimes people have a bad experience and 'trash' the place in a review. Sometimes its the place and sometimes it is the guest. One person's dirty room is another person's clean room.

Any place in Costa Rica is liable to be uneven. I love La Amistad, but it has its "quirks".

The question is what have these places done to address any legitimate bad reviews?

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Any opinion or observation in the post above is purely presented for entertainment purposes and does not promote "sexual tourism" or "human trafficking". The laws of Costa Rica apply to all activities in Costa Rica. No warranty is expressed or implied. Void where prohibited by law. Your experience, observations or perspective may be different.

In exile in pu*sy prison

Possibly one way to weed out fake reviews on Tripadvisor is to read only the Level 6 reviews.

Keep in mind that most people are quicker to tell about a bad experience than a good one. It's human nature.

This is very true. Only about 10% of the guests at the Lodge write a TripAdvisor review since 2015. They are uniformly good (4.5 or better) since I took over.

The Lodge predates TripAdvisor (us - 1996, TA - 2000). We have 32 reviews, 29 from 2015 to present. So, from 2000 - 2014, 3 reviews. 2015-now, 29 reviews.

I don't press guests to write them. However when someone mentions that they were influence by TripAdvisor reviews, I let them come to the decision that they should write one.

One of the early reviews mentioned food and dinged us because the website said we served certain dishes by name. The original owner / builder had a trained chef for a while and advertised some pretty gourmet food. They had a falling out, the chef left and over time the original owner changed the menu but not the website. After my boss bought the place no one considered renovating the website. So the guy's comment was legit.

If I paid shills to write reviews I'd have hundreds instead of 32!

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Any opinion or observation in the post above is purely presented for entertainment purposes and does not promote "sexual tourism" or "human trafficking". The laws of Costa Rica apply to all activities in Costa Rica. No warranty is expressed or implied. Void where prohibited by law. Your experience, observations or perspective may be different.

In exile in pu*sy prison

I really like Morgan's Cove and have stayed there many times over the years. It was also the subject of a VIP Trip report I wrote that you can find here...with pictures. viewtopic.php?f=23&t=47306

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The only thing that matters is happiness in all it forms...

Thanks for all the info