© Copyright 2018 Revvize, All Rights Reserved

Welcome to Revvize, the next generation of Restaurant & Hospitality quality consumer reviews!

The intent of Revvize is to give a new kind of voice to millions of my fellow consumers who would like to express their feelings about a hospitality experience, whether forgettable or memorable.

Note: Ludovic Le Fort is a nom de plume (alias). As author of Revvize blog posts, I will remain anonymous in order to avoid my real identity becoming a factor whenever visiting an establishment. In other words, Ludovic is a fictitious person…

The reviews, also called revvizions, are intended to make the hospitality transaction more equitable: if we’re satisfied, we gladly pay the bill. However, if we’re dissatisfied, there is little recourse to express our opinion, and we’re certainly expected to pay our bill even though we feel shortchanged.

Essentially, it’s time to make this a two-way street, but with fairness, thoughtfulness and objectivity for all involved.

In the age of Social Media and Yelping, everyone fancies themselves a restaurant critic.

Yelp is to real restaurant review as Twitter is to real journalism: it empowers the masses with a self-righteous, misguided sense of entitlement to a broadcast-worthy opinion. – Anonymous

Broadcasting an opinion about a hospitality experience is a form of power, and like all forms of power, it must be wielded with responsibility and deliberation. Just because we have an opinion doesn’t mean it should be indiscriminately shared with the whole world. Some professional restaurant critics wield so much power that they can make or break a restaurant with one review. Tweets or Yelp reviews, no matter how well intentioned, have also shown the ability to backfire.

Because our lives are so saturated with constant digital input from all directions, it is all too easy to take the path of least resistance and choose or dismiss a restaurant based on skimming the first two or three Yelp reviews.

Some of the crowd-sourced content on Yelp is helpful, at times, as a generic guide if unsure about where to have dinner in an unfamiliar place. More often than not, Yelp content is inaccurate because the author of the post is marginally eloquent, or outright incapable of articulating a cogent review.

Today’s popular scoring systems lack transparency. Without context, a score is meaningless, as well as highly subjective. Unless the scoring system provides pricing justification and context, its usefulness and relevance are marginal at best.

In wine review magazines, have you ever tried to make sense of the distinction between a fantastic cabernet you enjoyed that got an 87-point score, vs. an average cabernet you tasted that received a score of 93? Does it really matter, other than to justify a higher price point, whether a bottle got a score of 97 or a 94? Would people typically be able to tell the difference? Whose “objective” palate decided that score to be fair and accurate? Certainly it can’t be qualified as objective.

So let’s focus on hospitality: what is it about a dinner experience, good and bad, or somewhere in between, that motivates us to broadcast our opinion at the top of our lungs? Is it that we care so much about our contemporaries that we can’t wait to share a good thing, or make sure they stay away from a bad thing? Is it perhaps our inner pioneer that wants to plant a flag in the ground and lay claim to an undiscovered culinary gem? Is it simply a desire to be heard in the noisy universe of social media? All of these motivators are more or less subjectively relevant from one person to another.

The truth is that our motive as amateur restaurant critics is slightly more selfish and materialistic in nature. Altruism has little place in the world of restaurant reviews. Ultimately, it is about money, pure and simple. And not just any money: our money. The motivation to review is about our hard-earned cash that we are expected to fork over at the end (or beginning) of a meal, whether or not we enjoyed the experience. It is this rather prosaic, unglamorous motive that sparked the creation of Revvize.

Our palate is a very personal and unique part of us. Like fingerprints, there are none that are exactly alike. A restaurant that our friends find charming may leave us completely unimpressed; conversely, our passion for an establishment may be mystifying to others. Does that make them wrong? Does that make us wrong? Absolutely not; it only makes us different. A scoring system should be capable of accounting for these differences without making one person right and the other wrong.

At best we may share a limited spectrum of cultural flavor profiles with someone and, in a limited fashion, find someone else’s description of their experience relatable. For example, this is true of curry flavor. To someone from India, curry is the most natural flavor in the world. Conversely, feed curry for the first time to an Iowa native who has never traveled to a big city, their reaction to this new flavor will be far different and unpredictable. Within the context of dining experience, cultural and ethnic heritage matter tremendously. A scoring system should be capable of accounting for these cultural and geographical differences.

For some of us, flavor will be the top element that makes a dining experience memorable or forgettable. If we crave that sensation we felt when first biting into the best BBQ ribs we’ve ever had, we will most likely go back and bring friends, even if service was sub-par, or hygiene was marginal. For others it may be the atmosphere, the décor, quality of service, cleanliness, or even how quickly the restaurant can serve the food.

For years now, having accumulated thousands of dining experiences all over the world, Revvize feels it is time to create a restaurant review model that provides context, transparency, real depth of review, and maintains fairness (objectivity) to the establishment being reviewed, all in a format that remains user-friendly for the masses.

Consciously or subconsciously, regardless of age, culture or ethnicity, every diner will ask himself or herself in a binary fashion: do I want to come back to this place, or do I not. Far too many times, customers are left feeling that they had great food, but the experience was cheapened by flippant, nonchalant or inexistent service – and the reverse is also true. How do you account for this experiential discrepancy? How do you review with fairness a restaurant that you wish had done better, in a way that makes it possible for them to improve their overall customer experience?

Restaurateurs work hard to create a dining experience, and diners work hard to earn the money they spend. Isn’t it time that both sides of this equation had a review forum based on fairness, objectivity and transparency?

No restaurant owner ever wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves “today, I’m going to instruct my staff to do a bad job; I’m planning on disappointing as many customers as possible.” Restaurant owners and operators have a fundamental incentive and desire to do a good job for their customers, especially because the Internet has leveled the playing field. Every flaw is now highly visible in a fiercely competitive marketplace, especially in large urban areas. A wide variety of unfortunate and random circumstances, few of which can be controlled, routinely get in the way of the most passionate business owners’ success.

The next blog post will be our first actual restaurant review, based on the principles presented in this introductory piece.

© Copyright 2018 Revvize, All Rights Reserved

A phenomenal customer experience isn’t difficult to achieve, you just need to genuinely care about your customer’s experience. — Unknown