No room at the Inn
[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.
I don’t know where your information comes from, but I would check facts before publication. There is no link to any Riverside Inn Hotel on the Macroom.ie website. There is no hotel of that name mentioned anywhere on the site.
Is this your own IQTrainwreck?
Alan
On the day we looked at this report in 2011, there was a link on the website to the hotel in question which resolved to the hotel in Enniscorthy. We have updated the post to reflect the fact that the macroom.ie website has been redesigned since the original post was written nd that many of the links we included are now out of date.
In an archive of the macroom.ie site taken back in July 2011 (http://web.archive.org/web/20100827125353/http://macroom.ie/tourism_accom.htm) shows that there was a link to the Riverside Park Hotel (with a http://www.riversideparkhotel.ie url) at that point. The Enniscorthy hotel had the url riversideparkhotel.com so it is possible that on the day the issue we wrote about occured an error had crept into that old version of the site which put a .com instead of a .ie at the end of the URL behind the hyperlinked text on the site.
The new site looks great by the way.