Best and Worst Motorway Services
Motorway Services Online allows everybody to rate all the busiest service areas according to a number of qualities. The highlights from that data can be found below, showing the best and worst service areas in each respect, as well as the best and worst operators. This can be compared with data from previous years using the selection boxes on the right.
To contribute to the ratings, find a service area, tap its name, then look at the box to the right of the page.
A complete list of the current standings can be found at MSO:All Ratings.
How do the ratings work?
We are not the only organisation to rate service stations. A number of official and unofficial bodies have joined the bandwagon, with many of them using a narrow sample size before declaring they've found the country's best service area in the hope of scoring some free publicity for themselves. It usually works.
The biggest and most reliable national survey at the moment comes from Transport Focus. Some other historical surveys can be worth a read too.
Ours is a little different. Firstly, we're the most thorough. If you open up the service area page, you'll see we break down the ratings in to three categories, covering how quick it is to get in and out, how well-run it is and how much there is to do. We record these scores separately to make sure there's no doubt about where the issues are, and when you're searching for services, we let you choose for yourself which factors you're concerned about.
More importantly, our default samples use a weighted total. This takes note of what the official bodies are saying, and compares it with what our readers are saying, and looks for the trend (a surge of bad scores will carry more influence than an older, good score, as it is predicting what the next visitor will think).
Having said this, any service station can have good days and bad days. Over the years, we have noticed the scores have become more unpredictable, which is good because it means the names who used to always be at the bottom have got better. That's why we now use the weighted ratings. Even so, like you'd expect from any advice website, this is only an interesting tool and should be used as such.
This page is cached and generally updates every 48 hours. This, and possible rounding issues, means there may be slight discrepancies between the exact figures you see on different pages. However the formula and database remains the same across every service area.