This New York Inn's policy of charging $500 fine for every bad Yelp review backfires tremendously

Shawn Knight

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york inn yelp hotel negative reviews

Your wedding day should be one of the happiest and most memorable occasions of your life, right up there with graduating with a college degree, the birth of your first child, etc. Should you happen to book your wedding at a particular Hudson, New York hotel, however, you may get more than you bargained for.

The Union Street Guest House (USGH), in an effort to deter negative online reviews, has a policy in which they'll fine whoever booked the event (usually the bride and groom) $500 for every negative review against their establishment placed on any Internet site by anyone that attends your wedding or event.

The Inn adds that if you remove the negative review, you'll get your money back.

It's an unprecedented policy that's drawing criticism across the web today. As a result, USGH's Yelp page is now filled with hundreds of one-star reviews regarding the policy. The real kicker is the fact that the Inn's last review before today's tirade was back in April and before that, November of last year.

USGH management has since removed the policy from their website but the damage has already been done.

According to this article from Sam Pratt, USGH owner Chris Wagoner said the policy regarding wedding fines was put on their 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, Wagoner said. 

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This whole "Sue or Charge for negative reviews" thing is down right ridiculous. Everyone knows that stores/products/service you name it is getting worse by the year and if people aren't allowed to voice their opinion it's not only wrong and unfair, but it also makes those 3 things get worse faster.
 
They should publish those facts on their website, before a booking. That would be a merciful way of putting themselves out of business.

It gets ridiculously complex, trying to film every slow waiter, sticking thermometers in every piece of food that should be hot, but it's not. Perhaps people could bring bite force testing equipment to determine how tough the meat is.

Still, it would be much easier to just go someplace else first.(y)
 
Several US hotels (all non-chain operations AFAIK) are currently suing former guests for posting negative reviews. I look forward to hearing about how, after paying both their own and their victim's legal fees, they were forced to close down. On the million-to-one chance that one of these dirtbags actually wins we can expect the entire hospitality industry to to self-immolate within a year or two. Foreigners make fun of America's obesity epedemic, second-rate education system and many other failings both real and imagined. What they *should* be making fun of is how absurdly litigious our society has become.
 
The only thing you can control is yourself. Trying to control others through various methods ultimately fails.
Perhaps if they said, write a positive review and get a x% discount might have worked out better for them.
 
Ouch, D*I*c*k got censored ... I was merely referring to that guy's name.
It's probably "Richard" anyway. But perhaps, like the famous photographer Richard Avedon, he prefers to be called, (at least by his close friends), as, "D**k.

But yeah, Proper name or genitalia reference, our software just won't put up with it. Even with a capital "D".
 
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If your Inn sucks that badly that you have to worry this much about negative reviews, then you need to fix something...
 
If they thought they were so great then they should've offered guests $500 for honestly finding fault with their service/s. The negative reviews they got were probably well justified but now the damage has been done and no amount of apologizing can fix it. RIP USGH
 
Problem with this is how do you know if a negative review was not just something made up and paid for by competition?
I get where these companies are coming from sometimes in wanting the reviews to be factual and not slander, but they really need to find a better way to go about it.
 
Oh we do make fun of your absurdly litigious society... unfortunately it is now spreading to our societies too. thanks for that!
 
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