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A UK hotel has come up with a way to fend off all the thumbs-down that are clotting up its online reviews: rather than upping the thread count on their sheets or, say, introducing a vacuum cleaner to the dining room a bit more frequently, they’re promising to charge customers £100 for bad reviews.
The hotel – Broadway Hotel, Blackpool – must be raking it in, given that out of 255 reviews on TripAdvisor, 146 of them rate the place as bottom-of-the-barrel “terrible”.
One of the hotel’s bad reviews comes from Tony and Jan Jenkinson.
The Whitehaven couple spent one night in the hotel where, other reviewers say, the cutlery is “filthy”, the breakfast “disgusting”, the beds are on a “strange slant”, and the bathroom door doesn’t always shut when you’re on the loo.
Well, the Broadway Hotel now believes that it’s time for the Jenkinsons to pay up for having the audacity to not enjoy their stay.
After leaving a bad review in which they called the hotel a “rotten stinking hovel”, the couple were greeted with a £100 “fine” on their credit card statement, according to the BBC.
It’s not like the couple hadn’t been warned that it would happen – it was there in teensy tiny type on the booking document that Jan couldn’t read, since she wasn’t wearing her reading glasses.
After all, the hotel’s policy is to charge for bad reviews.
Its typographically itty-bitty policy starts out reasonably enough:
Despite the fact that repeat customers and couples love our hotel, your friends and family may not.
… but goes on to eensie-weensily inform customers that being honest about their accommodations in online reviews has nasty consequences:
For every bad review left on any website, the group organiser will be charged a maximum £100 per review.
The BBC reports that the matter’s being investigated by Trading Standards, which handles consumer protection in the UK.
John Greenbank, north trading standards area manager, told the BBC that Broadway Hotel has come up with a “novel” way to prevent bad reviews:
I have worked for trading standards for many years and have never seen anything like this.
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.
“Novel”?
That’s actually giving the hotel more credit for originality than it deserves.
This shtick is not novel at all. In fact, California passed a bill in September that protects customers from getting penalized by companies after writing bad reviews.
The so-called Yelp Bill was passed in order to protect consumers against non-disparagement clauses that businesses sneak into consumer contracts and which forbid customers from leaving negative reviews on sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor.
Such non-disparagement contracts threaten fines or legal action that work against the sharing of honest customer experiences, Yelp said at the time.
Businesses that have pulled this trick include a swanky New York hotel that was telling wedding couples that it would deduct $500 from their deposit for any guest who groused about it online.
The Jenkinsons are trying to get a refund from their credit card company.
Councillor John McCreesh, cabinet member for trading standards, told the BBC that businesses should worry more about giving good service, less about trying to muzzle unhappy customers:
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.
Image of one star review courtesy of Shutterstock.
Remarkable that this isn’t even the worst rated place in Blackpool on Tripadvisor….
People should start paying with a disposable credit card with only the amount to cover the bill or cash only
Or simply dispute the charge.
…and reading exactly what they are agreeing to before signing, because as disgusting as this is, they did agree to it. In my opinion the first clue that the place is a dump is when they tell you there is a fine for a bad review… but I could be wrong.
This is theft pure and simple, the Police should be investigating this as well.
Sad…we’ve actually entered an era where corporations have more free speech rights than real people.
If it were a way to prevent bad reviews the hotel would be more open about their policy and not hide it in the fine print. This is about making money; plain and simple.
I was instantly reminded of the backstory of “Fawlty Towers” while reading this. In a nutshell, the Montey Python crew once stayed in a hotel so terrible, and with such a rude, useless owner, that John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote a TV show parodying it. It’s a rare comedy that holds up that well after 40 years, but it seems that terrible hotels are still trying to pull the same shenanigans today.
Such a policy is arrogant and bad business. Hotels that are actually good will have no need of such a clause, and certainly not in tiny print. The best way to react to a public bad review is to try to reach out to that customer publicly and ask if there’s anything you can do to make it up to them. Instead the Broadway Hotel and others have hopefully just bought themselves the bad publicity they deserve.
How did they know for sure who it was so they could charge them? I usually don’t use my real name on sites like that.
To be fair, the whole story on the UK news mentioned that the room only cost £35 and the Hotel had rooms from £15. Also the £100 charge for bad press was in the T&C’s.
Nevertheless, it was a shocking thing to charge their customers for bad feedback, but equally the hotels pricing should be taken into account too.