Certificates of Excellence

This owl has been drinkingHurrah! Exit Games UK has been updated and it’s not by me, and it’s in safe hands, and I’m very little if anything to do with it any more, and that feels tremendous. Nevertheless, here’s a dry old post about exit games. No reason, just felt like it.

That funny old TripAdvisor owl has been out awarding Certificates of Excellence for 2016. As far as I can tell, they have been awarded to UK sites including, in alphabetical order:

  • Agent November, London
  • BathEscape, Bath
  • Breakout Games, Aberdeen
  • Breakout Liverpool, Liverpool
  • Breakout Manchester, Manchester
  • Can You Escape, Edinburgh
  • Clue Finders, Liverpool
  • Clue HQ, Blackpool
  • Clue HQ, Warrington
  • clueQuest, London
  • Crack The Code, Sheffield
  • Cyantist, Bournemouth
  • Dr. Knox’s Enigma, Edinburgh
  • ESCAP3D, Belfast
  • Escape Hour, Edinburgh
  • Escape Land, London
  • Escape Live, Birmingham
  • Escape Quest, Macclesfield
  • Escape Rooms, London
  • Escape, Edinburgh
  • Escape, Glasgow
  • Escape, Newcastle
  • Ex(c)iting Game, Oxford
  • Exit Newcastle, Newcastle
  • Exit Strategy, Liverpool
  • GR8escape York, York
  • HintHunt, London
  • Live Escape Rooms, Plymouth
  • Locked In Games, Leeds
  • Lockin Real Escape, Manchester
  • Lock’d, London
  • Logiclock, Nottingham
  • Lost & Escape, Newcastle
  • Mystery Cube, London
  • Puzzlair, Bristol
  • Salisbury Escape Rooms, Salisbury
  • The Escape Room, Manchester
  • The Gr8 Escape, Belfast
  • The Great Escape Game, Sheffield
  • The Live Escape, Huddersfield
  • Tick Tock Unlock, Leeds
  • Tick Tock Unlock, Liverpool

For the record, and for the benefit of those travelling from afar, that’s 7 in London, 4 in each of Liverpool and Edinburgh, 3 in each of Manchester and Newcastle and 2 in each of Leeds, Sheffield and Belfast. I don’t swear to that list being exhaustive (E&OE, E-I-E-I-O) but I think I like my methodology.

Some investigation points to a page suggesting that “The Certificate of Excellence accounts for the quality, quantity and recency of reviews submitted by travellers on TripAdvisor over a 12-month period. To qualify, a business must maintain an overall TripAdvisor bubble rating of at least four out of five, have a minimum number of reviews and must have been listed on TripAdvisor for at least 12 months.” TripAdvisor’s own rankings don’t even seem to marry up exactly with the certificates: it ranks some sites that have missed out more highly than other sites that have got them, and there are some obvious omissions that would surely be considered controversial. (It’s hard to believe they can have missed out on at least one of those criteria.) But there we are, and some degree of quasi-official certification of excellence may be more useful than no degree of quasi-official certification of excellence. Particularly if your site ended up winning one.

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