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The Corliss Group Review of Hotel in New York about $500 bad review fee9 Years AgoA
small hotel in upstate New York suddenly found itself in a media maelstrom (and
a flood of bad online reviews) on Monday, and all for what it says was a joke.
The
Union Street Guest House in the Catskill Mountains in Hudson, New York, got
slammed by bad
online reviews after a story in The New York Post stated it had a policy of
charging customers $500 for each negative online review posted by wedding
guests after they stayed in the Greek Revival establishment, built in 1830.
As of
early morning Monday, the hotel’s website did have a policy statement in its
weddings section that stated: "If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or
other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind
for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from
your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by
anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. If you stay here
to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any
internet site you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review. (Please NOTE
we will not charge this fee &/or will refund this fee once the review is
taken down)."
Later
Monday, that policy was removed. When contacted by CNBC, the hotel said it was
all in jest. "The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a
tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago. It was meant to be taken
down long ago and certainly was never enforced," the Union Street Guest
House said in an email to CNBC.
The
story in The New York Post, followed by other media outlets, yielded dozens of
one-star reviews on Yelp and one from Jonathan S. who wrote: "That's
funny. Yelp doesn't publish real reviews I've gotten that are positive but
they'll publish all these negative reviews from people that have never been to
the establishment."
Experts
say the policy probably would have been difficult to enforce, anyway.
"Legally
it probably has the same effect as a no-smoking policy," said Gene
Policinski, the chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior
vice president of the First Amendment Center. "It's maybe more to do with
intimidation than enforcement."
A
policy like that wouldn’t fall under First Amendment laws because the inn is
not operated by the government, so enforcement would likely have fallen under
contract law as an agreement between the hotel owner and the customer,
Policinski said. |