CPseudonym
Moderator Emeritus
To become the Forum Hillbilly you'll first have to wrestle the title away from me first Eric.
Is Active Captain down?
- Thread starter BandB
- Start date
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If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Nomad Willy
Guru
Hardly Craig,
You have many other handles to live up to.
You have many other handles to live up to.
First, there are many more fuel updates made each week now than ever (discounting seasonal updates in the northeast). We automatically delete any price more than a couple of weeks old after warning the marina. We'd rather show no data than old data that's probably wrong.
What we've found is that marinas with good fuel prices update their price data very consistently, every time it changes. There are marinas who have told us they update the ActiveCaptain price before they change the pump because they know it brings in more people and want to get the information out.
Marinas who don't seem to offer good fuel pricing, instead offering it as a "service" at generally higher prices, don't want their prices displayed. That's a shame but it's understandable.
So the way I look at it, if you're shopping around for fuel, it's more important to get the prices from the facilities that have the best prices. Facilities that have higher prices might not show a price. Once you realize that, you can see how it all works pretty well.
I put more value in the comments than the ratings. If the negative is because a marina doesn't have a laundry that I didn't need anyway, then I won't avoid it. If it's that the depth is 4' vs the 8' claimed and that the docks are in horrible shape with many pieces potentially damaging a boat, then I'll be very concerned. I also look for consistency of reviews and largely dismiss the outlier. One other thing I do is look at time and trends. I've seen many marinas that built up high or low ratings over the years but have recently turned sharply in the opposite direction. Typically a management and maybe even ownership change.
Yes, the ratings (number of stars) can be confusing, both in reading reviews and in writing them. I've seen low ratings and the comment was "my wife fell jumping to the dock because there was no dockhand present." I saw a low rating on an anchorage because the nearby marinas wanted to charge the reviewer what he considered too much to dock his dinghy and take a shower.
Personally, I'm reluctant sometimes to give a marina a low rating because I may have to return someday. I try my best but I find it difficult to sum up a marina experience with a choice of five stars. It's a great marina with great amenities but it's too far to walk to anything - five stars or do you deduct for the distance to town? You asked for a face dock but they ignored your request and put you in a slip?
Personally, I'm reluctant sometimes to give a marina a low rating because I may have to return someday. I try my best but I find it difficult to sum up a marina experience with a choice of five stars. It's a great marina with great amenities but it's too far to walk to anything - five stars or do you deduct for the distance to town? You asked for a face dock but they ignored your request and put you in a slip?
That seems to have changed over the years. Now that you have explained it, I understand and won't bother with the ones that don't show a price.
What's the story with the marinas that don't show up under the fuel tab?
I guess they don't have a fuel price or don't provide fuel since the list is made up only from the live fuel data.
Regarding "stars" - I think there are some people who read too much into it. Averaging 4.3 or 4.6 doesn't matter. In fact, it really doesn't matter if you give a marina 4 or 5 stars. What matters is that you're not giving them 1 or 2 stars. The star ratings are a great way to segment good marinas from bad ones. Assuming there are more than about 10 reviews, a marina averaging 4.2 stars is going to be exceptionally better than one averaging 2.1 stars.
The crowd is always right in these types of things and the statistical power of a dozen boaters agreeing on something like the quality of a marina is over-the-top accurate. That's not an opinion - it's been proven over and over in multiple disciplines. It turns out that a market segment like boaters is the perfect size to extrapolate enormous amounts of data from something like a star rating.
ranger58sb
Guru
If you already have a tablet on board (ideally with a GPS feed to it), running any of the nav apps that integrate AC data is relatively easy and reasonably cheap.
Using the AC website through a browser (either tablet or PC of some sort, whatever), when you've got 'net access, is also easy and cheap.
IOW, it's not like you necessarily need an additional piece of installed nav equipment and big-bucks software.
-Chris
I used the free Android app on tablet & phone while cruising.
It allowed downloading "tiles" that covered an area so wifi was not reqd to access the data.
Late this season I found several tiles in our cruising area that no longer worked making the free app useless.
Has anyone found a substitute free app that works and allows downloads and access w\o wifi?
I've tried Smart Chart and Locations but can't get them to display the AC info?
The crowd is the customer. I see business owners who want to argue with the reviews and ratings and then wonder why they're losing money. Others embrace the reviews and use them to address problems and correct things and respond to them in that way. They're far more likely to be successful.
I was reading notes a while back on a small store our staff looked at. The reviews were very bad and centered around the place being unfriendly and the owner/manager being a total jerk. The owner then tried to explain what the problem was with each negative customer and why it was the customer who was the problem. 45 reviews, 2 were 4's or 5's, 5 were 3's and 38 were 1's and 2's and the problem is the customer in his mind.
You can dismiss a review here and there, but not the total weight. As a reader, you decide which reviews to dismiss in your mind. I will say this. We have docked at 100 marinas this year. Probably average about that each year. We've read reviews on all the marinas where we've docked. We haven't had any major surprises. We read the details, don't just look at the stars. Even places that had Wifi problems, we knew we might well encounter that. The few times we've anchored the reviews have been helpful too. They don't just rate the anchorage but tell you how to anchor there or why not to anchor there.
Cottontop
Senior Member
Try SEAiq Pilot. The lite version is free.
