Shropshire Tourist Information and Visitor Guide

In response to feedback from both customers and visitors we have made a few changes to the way the accommodation listings operate. In doing this we have tried to address the following issues:

• Requests from customers to provide a “priority” listing facility.
• Concerns from customers and visitors about providers from “other locations” showing in the listings.
• Requests from customers to appear in locations other than their local (which of course contradicts the above).
• Requests from visitors for more specific location information.
• Confusion about the QA rating system from visitors .
• Complaints from visitors about the “vacancies” feature being left permanently switched on.

The main changes are as follows:

• The “Vacancies” feature has been removed.
• The Visit Britain & AA symbols have been removed and replaced with larger stars and an optional description of your detailed QA rating.
• Distance to towns added to the listing.
• Multimap link added to listings. This is based on postcode so may give slightly wrong location for some providers.
• The Ironbridge town search has been changed to “Ironbridge Gorge” and the search results now include providers from Broseley, Benthall etc.
• The Telford town search result now includes providers from Wellington.
• The “Extended Search – up to 15 miles” has been removed. This was causing confusion as most places in Shropshire are with 15 miles of each other! Also very few visitors used it.
• Sequence on listings is no longer affected by QA ratings - all customers are now treated equally!

Location & Sequence Changes

Each Accommodation Search page now has two sections:

• Accommodation in the immediate vicinity
• More Accommodation

All references to distance below

• are in miles
• are as the crow flies
• are to the town centre (not the outskirts).

Distances are rounded UP to the nearest mile.

Towns are the ones listed at the end of this page.

Deciding your location

Every customer will now appear on two listings. Which pages you appear on is now determined by the foillowing:

Nearest Town

Nearest Town determines which page your listing shows under the immediate vicinity block.

This must always be your nearest town centre, regardless of your postal address. Eg it may be that your postal address is Craven Arms, but you are located 5 miles from Ludlow and 6 miles from Craven Arms. In this case you can have your Nearest Town as Ludlow. If you are exactly half way between towns, then you can choose which one is nearest. 

There are two exceptions: if you are in the Broseley area, your nearest town should be Ironbridge. If you are the Wellington area, your nearest town should be Telford.

The Nearest Town sequence is shuffled on a random basis at least once a week.

Associated Town

Associated Town determines which page your listing shows under the More Accommodation block.

You can select any town you wish to be associated with! But there is a trade off – the further away you are from an associated town, the further down the list you will appear. For example, if you are located in Ludlow and you have Ironbridge as your associated town, then you may appear right of the bottom of the Ironbridge listing.

Tip! If you choose a "honeypot" as your associated town you may well be competing with many others. For example many providers want to be on the Ironbridge Gorge page. It could be that you would fare better by chossing a less popular town.

Sequencing is now:

• Priority Links
• Immediate Vicinity – Random (shuffled weekly) selected from nearest
• More Accommodation – distance from associated – selected from associated

In more detail:

Priority Links

We now have the facility for “Priority Links” which always appear at the top of the page.  The listings are highlighted using a different colour from the other listings - contact Virtual Shropshire for costs.

Immediate vicinity

Beneath the priority links all “immediate vicinity” providers will be displayed in random sequence (shuffled at least once a week). 

More Accommodation

This will display in distance from the associated town, with the nearest providers first.

So in summary then we have a solution which gives you the opportunity to pay for a priority list (soon) and choose the town you wanted to be associated with. It also gives the visitors a much clearer “at a glance” indication of your location.

How to change your entry

For security we have disabled the towns / distance boxes on the self-update system, so change requests must be emailed or preferably sent via our support request form .

If you email changes please ensure you clearly state your establishment name and type on the email ! Please do not phone in changes or it may got lost in our paper work!

Towns List

These are the towns you can include as either your nearest, or associated town: