Tag Archives: accomodation

No room at the Inn

Leave a reply

[UPDATE – 17 August 2012: It has been drawn to our attention that the Macroom.ie website has been redesigned since this post was written. None of the links referred to below exist on the new site. This post addresses an issue that was identified as existing on one day in 2011 but which, when we discussed with contacts in the hotel industry, we learned of similar issues where tourists arrive at a hotel believing they had a booking but had in fact booked at a different hotel of the same or similar name and URL in a different place.

The new macroom.ie website is well worth a visit and has lots of interesting information about Macroom and its surrounding localities, including my personal favourite, the Prince August factory (which I used to order moulds and metal from to make toy soldiers as a child).]

Via Twitter we came across this tale of Information Quality fun and games from the South West of Ireland.

Macroom is a popular tourist destination in Co. Cork. The local Town Council have invested in a portal website for the town Macroom.ie.  One of the boasts of Macroom is that is just 45 minutes away by car from the tourist hotspot that is Killarney, with its National Park and other attractions. (Macroom itself is home to Ireland’s only Toy Soldier factory).

 

On Macroom.ie you can link to various hotels in the locale to book accommodation. There is just one small problem.

The Riverside Park Hotel that is linked to from this site isn’t in Macroom. It is in Wexford. Over 3 hours away by car.

View Larger Map

Of course, this could have been avoided if, as part of the information creation process (i.e. building the link) some attention had been paid to the physical address of the Riverside Park Hotel and Leisure Club that was being linked to rather than selecting the first link that appears in a search for “Riverside Park Hotel Macroom” on Google (the .com variant of the .ie address already linked to here). [note that as Google search algorithms change the search results you get today may not match the results we got in August 2011]
Or, as might also be the case, the problem could have arisen now due to a back-end editing error that resulted in a typo putting “.com” in the linked-to URL rather than “.ie” and it would have been easily fixed in time.
[update- 17 August 2012] In any event, the site has been updated now to a new look and feel and the links we used to track this issue are no longer active. But it still serves as a cautionary tale for anyone creating web content to double check links to make sure they point to the intended location. [/update]