Hotel starts handing out $500 fines for customers who leave bad Yelp reviews
Running a business in the age of online reviews is obviously very stressful. Customers who don’t enjoy their time at an establishment could irreparably tarnish its reputation with a Yelp rating and a few short sentences, even if the customers are the ones are causing the problem in the first place. In order to avoid any issues like this, one hotel is going above and beyond the call of duty to keep guests from even considering writing a bad review: $500 fines.
Page Six reports that the Union Street Guest House (USGH) hotel in Hudson, NY is charging couples who book rooms for their weddings $500 for every bad review their guests publish online. The following quote appeared on the Events & Wedding page on the USGH website, but has since been removed:
“Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our inn, your friends and families may not. If you have booked the inn for a wedding or other type of event [...] and given us a deposit of any kind [...] there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review [...] placed on any Internet site by anyone in your party.”
The deposit would be refunded once the negative reviews were taken down. Whether or not this is still the policy is unknown, but we have a feeling this story is going to be much worse press for the hotel than a Yelp review ever could be.
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This article was originally published on BGR.com
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