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WELCOME
TO
How
to Participate | Company
Info
The value of information depends on
its usefulness. Simply put, whatever allows you to make informed
choices will be to your advantage. Top Rated books aims to take
the guesswork out of selecting services for outdoor activities.
The value of the Top Rated concept is that businesses earn a
place on these pages only when they receive favorable ratings
from a majority of clients. If ninety percent of the customers
agree that their purchase of services met or exceeded their
expectations, then its realistic to assume that you will also be
satisfied when you purchase services from the outdoor
professionals and businesses included in these pages. A novice
might be open to any experience without any preconceived notions
while a veteran will be disappointed when anything less then
great expectations aren’t met. The intent behind
is to protect the consumer from being misled or deceived.
Top Rated Surveys has quantified the value of customer
satisfaction and created a greater awareness of top-rated
outdoor professionals. It remains up to you to choose and be the
judge of you own experience. With our help, you will have the
advantage of being better informed when making that pick.
The
intent of the Top Rated rating is to provide the outdoor
enthusiast and his/her family with an objective and easy to read
reference source that would list only those businesses and
outdoor professionals who have agreed to be rated and have been
overwhelmingly endorsed by their clients.
There
are many great outdoor
professionals
(Guides, Captains, Ranches, Lodges, Outfitters) who deserve full
recognition for putting their experience, knowledge, long hours and
big heart, into this difficult job. With this book we want to reward
those deserving professionals while providing an invaluable tool to
the general public. In this respect it would be useful to share the
philosophy of our
Company succinctly illustrated by our.....
Mission Statement:
“To
encourage and promote the highest professional and ethical standards
among those individuals, Companies, Groups or Organizations who
provide services to the Outdoor Community. To communicate and share
the findings and values of our research and surveys to the public
and other key groups. To preserve everyone’s individual right of a
respectful, knowledgeable and diversified use of our Outdoor
Resources”
Our
business niche is well defined and our job is simply to listen
carefully.
THEY
‘the experts’ VS. WE ‘the People’
Top
Rated Surveys were conducted by asking people such as yourself, who
rafted, fished, hunted or rode a horse on a pack trip with a
particular outdoor professional or business, to rate their services,
knowledge, skills and performance. Only the ones who received A- to
A+ scores from their clients are found listed in these pages.
The
market is flooded with various publications written by ‘experts’
claiming to be the ultimate source of information for your vacation.
We read books with titles such as “The Greatest River Guides”,
“The Complete Guide to the Greatest Fishing Lodges” etc. We do
not claim to be experts in any given field, but we rather pass to
history as good....listeners. In the preparation of the
Questionnaires we listened first to the outdoor professionals’
point of view and then to the comments and opinions of thousands of
outdoor enthusiasts. We then organized the findings of our research
and surveys in this and other publications of this series. Thus we
will not attempt to tell how to fish, how to paddle or what to bring
on your trip. We are leaving this to the outdoor professionals
featured in this book, for they have proven to be outstanding in
providing much valuable information before, during and after your
trip.
TRUE
(paid) ADVERTISING: AN OXYMORON
Chili
with beans is considered a redundant statement for the overwhelming
majority of cooks but it is an insulting oxymoron for any native
Texan. In the same way while ‘true paid advertising’ is a
correct statement for some, it is a clear contradiction in terms for
us and certainly many of you. A classic oxymoron. This is why we do
not accept commissions, donations, invitations, or, as some cleverly
express it, “...extra fees to help defray the cost of
publication”. Many articles are written every month in numerous
specialized magazines in which the authors tour the country from
lodge to lodge and camp to camp sponsored, invited, or otherwise
compensated in many different shapes or forms. It is indeed a form
of direct advertising and, although this type of writing usually
conveys a good amount of general information, in most cases it lacks
the impartiality so valuable when it comes to make the final
selection for your vacation or outdoor adventure. Without belittling
the invaluable job of the professional writers and their integrity,
we decided to approach the task of researching information and
sharing it with the public with a different angle and from an
opposite direction.
MONEY?
.. NO THANKS!
We
are firmly committed to preserve the impartiality and the novelty of
the Top Rated idea. For this reason we want to reassure the reader
that the outdoor professionals and businesses featured in this book
have not paid (nor will they pay), any remuneration to Top Rated
Surveys in the form of money, invitations or any other
considerations. They have earned a valued page in this book solely
as the result of their hard work and dedication to their clients.
“A
spot in this book cannot be purchased: it must be earned”
SIZE
OF A BUSINESS IS NOT A FUNCTION OF ITS PERFORMANCE
Since
the embryonic stage of the Top Rated idea, during the compilation of
the first Top Rated book, we faced a puzzling dilemma. Should we
establish a minimum number of clients under which a business or
outdoor professional will not be allowed to participate in our
evaluating process? This would be a ‘safe’ decision when it
comes the time to elaborate the responses of the questionnaires. But
we quickly learned that many outdoor professionals limit, by choice,
the total number of clients and, by philosophy of life, contain and
control the size of their
business. They do not want to grow too big and sacrifice the
personal touches or the
freshness
of their services. In their words “we don’t want to take the
chance to get burned out by people.” They do not consider their
activity just a job, but rather a way of living. But if this
approach greatly limits the number of clients accepted every year we
must say that these outdoor professionals are the ones who often
receive outstanding ratings and truly touching comments from their
past clients. Some businesses have provided us with a list of
clients of 40,000, some with 25. In this book you will find both the
large and the small. From a statistical point, it is obvious that a
fly fishing guide who submitted a list of 32 clients, by virtue of
the sample size of the individuals surveyed, will implicitly have a
lower level of accuracy if compared to a business for which we
surveyed 300 guests. (Please refer to the Rating and Data
Elaboration Sections for details on how we established the rules for
qualification and thus operated our selection). We do not believe
that the size of business is a function of its good performance and
we feel strongly that those dedicated professionals who choose to
remain small deserve an equal chance to be included.
WE
TIP OUR HATS
We
want to recognize all the Guides, Captains, Ranches, Lodges and
Outfitters who have participated in our endeavor, whether they
qualified or not. The fact alone that they accepted to be
rated
by their past clients is a clear indication of how much they care,
and how willing they are to make changes. We also want to credit all
those outdoor enthusiasts who have taken the time to complete the
questionnaires and share their memories and impressions with us and
thus with you. Some of the comments sent to us were hilarious, some
were truly touching. We were immensely pleased by the reaction of
the outdoor community at large. The idea of “Top Rated Surveys”
was supported from the beginning by serious professionals and
outdoor enthusiasts alike. We listened to their suggestions, their
comments, their criticisms and we are now happy to share this
information with you.
QUESTIONNAIRES
“Our
books will be only as good as the questions we ask.”
We
posted this phrase in the office as a reminder of the importance of
the ‘tool’ of this trade. The questions. Specific Questionnaires
were tailored to each one of the different activities surveyed for
this series of books. While a few of the general questions remained
the same throughout, many were specific to particular activities.
The final objective of the questionnaire was to probe the many
different facets of that diversified field known as the outdoors.
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here to Apply on line for the TOP RATED Seal of Approval
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