How Mammoth Cave National Park used bad reviews to lure tourists

“I thought it would be like lord of the rings,” one deflated visitor said on Yelp. “But it was just some rocks.”

But the lukewarm reviews and scathing presence on a list of disappointing attractions turned into one of Mammoth Cave’s biggest successes of the year. The national park’s social media account wrote a promotion for the site spotlighting the bad reviews drudged up by JeffBet’s ranking. “A world of regret awaits you at Mammoth Cave!” an August Facebook post said.

In just a matter of weeks, the post received over 100,000 impressions. At the Kentucky State Fair, visitors approached local tourism groups quoting the post and wanted to talk about Mammoth Cave, according to Molly Schroer, management analyst at Mammoth Cave.

“Our followers on social media increased. People decided to follow us to watch our content,” she told Fortune. “We see that as a way to promote the park a lot more as a happy accident for us because a lot of [people], they didn’t even know we existed.”

JeffBet’s rankings should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, anyway. The Kennedy Space Center topped the list of disappointing destinations, and Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was the runner-up. And despite the one Mammoth Cave visitor who had hoped for a Tolkien-esque experience, the park otherwise has a 4.4-star Yelp average with over 400 reviews. 

Courtesy of Mammoth Cave National Park

The influx of interest in Mammoth Cave is good news for the tourism industry in Kentucky, which had its biggest year in 2023, generating nearly $14 billion for the state and bringing in over 79 million visitors. But for some national parks, a Covid-era explosion in visitation has done as much harm as good, as tourists toss litter or defecate on protected areas.

Schroer insists Mammoth Cave’s 15 minutes of internet fame has been a windfall for the park. Too soon to quantify the impact of the post, she will keep an eye on the park’s online reservations in the coming months to track any sizable changes.

Escaping the tourist trap

Mammoth Cave’s unconventional marketing is the latest example of how utilizing bad reviews has become a sought-after strategy for the tourism industry, which has only recently returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Similar campaigns have had success in the past. For five years, Nebraska’s state tagline was, “Nebraska, honestly it’s not for everyone.” Though it retired the epigram in February, John Ricks, director of the Nebraska Tourism Commission, told state lawmakers the slogan worked. Interest among tourists increased from 19% in 2019 to 39% in the latest survey. The self-abasing slogan owned the negative reputation that state had for being flat and boring, which caught the eyes of disinterested tourists.

“The only way we could get their attention, honestly, was by agreeing with them, and then counteracting it,” Ricks said, according to the Nebraska Examiner. 

Tourism company Visit Oslo had similar success earlier this summer with its campaign “Is it even a city?” The two-minute video shows a forlorn local visiting parts of the Norwegian city, lamenting the walkability of Oslo’s smaller radius compared to Paris or New York, and critiquing Edward Munch’s The Scream painting as “not exactly the Mona Lisa.” The video went viral, with over 770,000 Youtube views in about two months.

“If you look like 20 or 30 years back, it was really maybe a little bit of a dull destination,” Visit Oslo director of marketing Anne-Signe Fagereng told Fortune. “Then there’s been this huge kind of transformation in Oslo over the last decades, but we didn’t quite have the credibility, so we had to try more of a creative angle to make people realize everything that Oslo had to offer.”

Fagerang has seen social media posts of people’s trips to Oslo, often with the video linked in the post. Travel industry trends database ForwardKeys found a sizable increase in intent to visit Oslo after the release of the ad, with keyword searches increasing by almost 1.5 million in the two months following the campaign launch.

As it turns out, there is some credence to the adage “all press is good press.” A 2016 Harvard Business School study found that among reviews of Washington-area restaurants, a one-star Yelp review was associated with an up to 9% increase in revenue. 

Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, found that while good reviews certainly result in good sales, poor reviews can do the same, so long as a product’s intended audience is not already familiar with the product. 

For small-name brands or sites, bad reviews can help put them on the map. As they weather the storm of initial bad press, they eventually can overcome it and ultimately remain in the public eye. 

“For purveyors of obscure products that get poor assessments, this is good news, suggesting that product awareness often lingers after the memory of the bad evaluation fades,” Berger wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2012.

That could explain why Mammoth Cave, one of the lesser-known national parks, was able to rack up 100,000 likes on a post, when most of its others garner a couple hundred. Schroer insisted the post was less of a marketing campaign and more of an inside joke.

“This really was just us having a lot of fun with our regular followers,” she said. “That was our main goal.”