Holy cow! We always post reviews for any motel/hotel where we have stayed. Luckily, we haven't had any horrible experiences, but we <thought> that we had done our due diligence. Now we won't be trusting such site reviews as much, unless we find a mixed bag and read the full reviews. Some people are just whiners, so it takes some research.

Couple's hotel 'fine' for bad review

A couple have been "fined" £100 by a Blackpool hotel they described as a "rotten stinking hovel" on travel review website Trip Advisor.

Tony and Jan Jenkinson posted the negative comment after being unimpressed with the one night they spent at the Broadway Hotel.

The couple, from Whitehaven, later found £100 charged to their credit card. The hotel said its policy was to charge for "bad" reviews.

Trading Standards are investigating.

Officials believe the hotel may have breached unfair trading practice regulations.

Peeling wallpaper

The manager of the hotel, on Burlington Road West, was unavailable when contacted by the BBC.

The hotel policy, contained in a booking document, reads: "Despite the fact that repeat customers and couples love our hotel, your friends and family may not.

"For every bad review left on any website, the group organiser will be charged a maximum £100 per review."

Retired van driver, Mr Jenkinson, 63, said: "It was filthy, dirty, rotten, stinking hovel run by muppets.

"The shower was filthy - my wife wouldn't even get into it to wash her hair. The wallpaper was peeling off, the kettle didn't work and there was no water at all in the bathroom.

"It was beyond a joke, and didn't get better at breakfast time. We went down in the morning and the staff were standing around messing with their mobile phones.

"I found the breakfast inedible - the bacon wasn't cooked - I couldn't finish it."

Mr and Mrs Jenkinson were on their way to visit family in Oxford when they decided to split up the journey.

They only choose the hotel because it had a car park and paid £36 for the double room.

Mr Jenkinson added: "At one point I opened the drawers of the chest of drawers and they fell in. If it had been a kid they could have been hurt."
The negative review was left on the Trip Advisor website
He said the details of the charge were in the booking documents, but his wife did not have her glasses on and signed it without reading the small print.

John Greenbank, north trading standards area manager, said it was a "novel" way to prevent bad reviews.

He said: "I have worked for trading standards for many years and have never seen anything like this.

Refund sought

"The hotel management clearly thinks they have come up with a novel way to prevent bad reviews, however we believe this could be deemed an unfair trading practice."

The couple have sought a refund via their credit card company.

Councillor John McCreesh, cabinet member for trading standards, said: "Customers need to be free to be honest about the service they're getting.

"Other customers depend upon it. Hotel owners should focus on getting their service right rather than shutting down aggrieved customers with threats and fines.

"People should have the right to vent their disappointment if a hotel stay did not meet their expectations and should not be prevented from having their say."

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/news/co ... ar-BBevjsT

Distressing ~ I've heard of "fining" for bad reviews in other industries as well ~ some companies have gone so far as to demand "mediation" replace "litigation" when it comes to "fining" for bad reviews of services or products ~

I can definitely relate to using rating services especially when traveling ~ for me, the best advice in using ratings services is to always remember that the rater is a stranger to you ~ you have no idea who that person is, you don't know her/his taste, standards, tolerances ~

Sooz

Never believe what reviews say. In my line it's places like angie's list. There are customers who use it to extort price breaks. Besides, contractors are encouraged to pay mega bucks to get top ranking.
It's all a scam.

Trip Advisor is a BIG travel site. I use it all the time.

Perhaps they could put a warning on this hotel's entry.

On the other had for 36 quid in Blackpool you shouldn't expect the Ritz.

Union Street Guest House, a self-described "historic" hotel in New York's Hudson River Valley, is testing the proposition that all press is good press. After the hotel's attempt to fine a wedding party $500 for each negative online guest review went viral, the Internet unleashed a torrent of outraged, one-star reviews on the inn's Yelp page.

The specific language in the hotel's terms—outlining how the $500 fines would be withheld from the wedding party's security deposit until the negative reviews were taken down—has since been removed and Union Street Guest House is quickly backtracking. "The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago," the inn said in a statement. "It was meant to be taken down long ago and certainly was never enforced." Union Street Guest House did not return multiple Slate requests for comment.

It would be convenient for the hotel if all this were just a bad joke gone awry. But the experience of one former guest, Rabih Zahnan, suggests that’s not the case. Last November, Zahnan wrote on Yelp that the hotel's management "had the gall" to threaten him financially about a negative review he’d posted two months earlier:





Alarmed by the emails, Zahnan told me he called the wedding couple to see whether Union Street Guest House had, in fact, charged them for the review. It hadn’t. A month later, he received a third message from the hotel. “We have no idea why you feel the need to continue to talk bad about us on-line,” read the unsigned email, which came from info@unionstreetguesthouse.com. “You guys do realize that your wedding party saw and agreed to this policy and your new comments will cost another $500.” The fourth and final email arrived a few days later, with a marked change of tone:

Hello there!

I am so sorry you did not enjoy your recent stay in my Inn. Please know that I have taken your comments to heart and will work on all of the issues.

I just wanted you to know, however, that I designed this place as an artist retreat and we very rarely allow wedding parties to hold all of our rooms for their guests mostly because I feel there are much better-suited places for wedding folk to stay here in Hudson.

Having said that, when I do agree to let a wedding party hold the rooms, because they cannot find rooms anywhere else, I ask for a deposit, part of which is to guarantee that I won't see any negative reviews online when, again, I have warned everyone that my place is not for everyone. (i.e. I want people who choose us, not forced to stay here because these were the rooms held).

So, just please know the staff can't refund the wedding party until your review is removed. I guess it's just up to you really.

By the way, I had a great time with some of your party (mutual Michigan fans) in the Lobby so I'm not sure why you felt folks felt uncomfortable, but I am truly sorry if that was the case.

Best wishes to you!!

Chris Wagoner

Zahnan never replied to any of the emails and didn’t hear anything else from Union Street Guest House after that. The couple, he says, told him they never signed any sort of contract with the hotel and only requested that it hold a few rooms for wedding guests to rent. His own arrangements with the hotel were made entirely by email, and at no point during that process was he sent or pointed to the policy around negative reviews. (He adds that he never met the owner at the wedding and is not a Michigan fan.)

“I’ve never heard of an experience like this, never been harassed like this,” Zahnan says. “They were using intimidation to take down reviews and scare people. In my opinion, you would never have a policy like this if you weren’t already getting negative reviews.”

Few would argue that threatening financial revenge on unsatisfied wedding parties is an acceptable business tactic. But did Union Street Guest House ever actually stray outside the law?

Oddly, perhaps, the legal system hasn't clearly dealt with this question. In 2003, the Supreme Court of New York came close to addressing this issue in People of the State of New York v. Network Associates. The New York attorney general's office had sued Network Associates (later McAfee) for a "censorship clause" that prohibited users of its software from publishing reviews of the product without "prior consent" from the company. The state declared that clause "unenforceable, illegal, and deceptive."

The court ruled in New York's favor but based its decision on a separate issue of consumer fraud; it ignored the question of whether a clause prohibiting customer reviews was unenforceable. "Right now there's not a lot of precedent as to how far a company can go in restricting the speech of users of its product," says Ken Dreifach, New York's lawyer on the Network Associates case and now an attorney at the ZwillGen law firm. "The truth is it doesn't come up very often."

That said, if a policy like the one employed by Union Street Guest House were to wind up in court, it would most likely be struck down as illegal under a doctrine of contract law known as unconscionability. "It says if there's a surprise term in the contract that is so unfairly one-sided that one can doubt that a reasonable party would have knowingly agreed to it, that the clause cannot be enforced," Scott Michelman, an attorney with Public Citizen, says. "Nobody enters into a consumer contract expecting that they're going to be paying a fine if another consumer doesn't like the business."

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"Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of its High Tech Law Institute, notes that the Union Street Guest House scheme was only possible because it was structured to deduct the fines from a... More...

-MarcParis

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"This is a fairly unusual term that most people would not expect in the consumer setting and that really imposes unfair penalties on people for their speech or for other people's speech," Michelman adds. "It also has the effect of shutting people up, which we as a society don't generally condone."

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of its High Tech Law Institute, notes that the Union Street Guest House scheme was only possible because it was structured to deduct the fines from a security deposit the hotel already possessed. For the inn to get the money otherwise, it would have to go to court, where a judge would have likely struck down that particular clause in its contract.

"There are some things we just don't allow contracts for," Goldman says. "The restriction on people being able to share their opinions about products and services in a marketplace—that's something we're not going to allow."

And if this week is any indication, consumer outrage is often sufficient to make businesses change their ways before the courts ever get involved.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/201 ... nline.html

either the site allows complete freedom for reviews, or it is not really a review site at all.