Mammoth Cave National Park in south-central Kentucky already holds a superlative title: It’s the world’s longest cave system, with more than 400 miles of explored passageways. Now, it’s on track to claim another title. Rating third on a list of the most disappointing tourist attractions in the United States by sports betting platform JeffBet.
“I thought it would be like Lord of the Rings,” one frustrated tourist said. said on Yelp. “But it’s just some rocks.”
But lukewarm reviews and a scathing presence on the list of disappointing attractions have become one of Mammoth Cave’s draws. greatest successes of the year. The national park’s social media account wrote an ad for the site highlighting the poor reviews from JeffBet’s ratings. “A world of regret awaits you at Mammoth Cave!” an Aug. Facebook Post speak.
In just a few weeks, the post received more than 100,000 impressions. At the Kentucky State Fair, visitors reached out to local tourism groups citing the post and wanting to talk about Mammoth Cave, according to Molly Schroer, a management analyst at Mammoth Cave.
“Our social media following has increased. People are deciding to follow us to see our content,” she said. Luck. “We see it as a way to promote the park more as a lucky coincidence for us because a lot of [people]They don’t even know we exist.”
Still, JeffBet’s rankings should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The Kennedy Space Center tops the list of disappointing destinations, with Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame coming in second. And while visitors to Mammoth Cave may be hoping for a Tolkien-like experience, the park still has a 4.4-star average on Yelp with more than 400 reviews.
Provided by Mammoth Cave National Park
The surge in interest in Mammoth Cave is good news for tourism in Kentucky, where biggest year by 2023, generating nearly $14 billion for the state and attracting more than 79 million visitors. But for some national parks, The boom in visitors during Covid has caused as much harm as benefit, as tourists litter or defecate in protected areas.
Schroer asserts that Mammoth Cave’s 15 minutes of internet fame has been an unexpected boon for the park. While it’s too early to quantify the post’s impact, she will be monitoring the park’s online bookings in the coming months to see if there are any significant changes.
Escape the tourist trap
Mammoth Cave’s unconventional marketing strategy is the latest example of how using negative reviews has become a sought-after strategy in the travel industry, only recently. has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Similar campaigns have worked in the past. For five years, Nebraska’s state slogan was, “Nebraska, let’s be honest, isn’t for everyone.” Though it discontinued the slogan in February, John Ricks, director of the Nebraska Tourism Commission, told state lawmakers that the slogan was effective. Tourist interest rose from 19% in 2019 to 39% in the latest survey. The self-deprecating slogan capitalized on the state’s negative reputation for being boring and bland, drawing attention away from otherwise uninterested tourists.
“Honestly, the only way we can get their attention is to agree with them and then react,” Ricks said. according to Nebraska Examiner.
Tour company Visit Oslo had similar success earlier this summer with campaign “Is it a city?” The two-minute video shows a sad local visiting parts of the Norwegian city, lamenting Oslo’s smaller walkability compared to Paris or New York, and criticizing Edward Munch. Scream picture as “inaccurate” Mona Lisa.” The video went viral, reaching more than 770,000 views on YouTube in just two months.
“If you look back 20 or 30 years ago, this could actually be quite a boring destination,” said Visit Oslo marketing director Anne-Signe Fagereng. Luck“Then there was a big transformation in Oslo over the past decades, but we didn’t have enough prestige, so we had to try a more creative angle to make people realize everything Oslo has to offer.”
Fagerang saw social media posts about people’s trips to Oslo, often with a video linked to in the post. Travel industry trends database ForwardKeys found a significant increase in intent to visit Oslo after the ad was released, with keyword searches increasing by nearly 1.5 million in the two months after the campaign launched.
In fact, there’s some truth to the saying “any press is good press.” A 2016 Harvard Business School study found that among reviews of restaurants in the Washington area, a one-star Yelp review was associated with a 9% increase in sales.
Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, establish While good reviews will certainly lead to good sales, bad reviews can also yield the same results, as long as the product’s target audience is not yet familiar with the product.
For small brands or websites, bad reviews can help put them on the map. Once they weather the initial storm of bad press, they can eventually move past it and remain in the public eye.
“For vendors of dubious products that receive poor reviews, this is good news, suggesting that product perceptions often persist long after the memory of a poor review fades,” Berger said. wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2012.
That might explain why Mammoth Cave, one of the lesser-known national parks, can get 100,000 likes on a post, while most other posts only get a few hundred. Schroer insists the post wasn’t a marketing campaign, but an inside joke.
“It’s really just us having a lot of fun with our regular followers,” she said. “That’s our main goal.”
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