Their website navigation is a very discrete image map in the middle of the page, http://www.unionstreetguesthouse.com/ obviously this was someone's first website.
It's probably not legal, if it is then it is unenforceable in court, even if it was in their terms contract.
I don't condone leaving negative reviews if you haven't stayed there, but if you do be sure to note that you have not stayed at the hotel and are just commenting on their policies to warn people, unless that is against the review sites policy, then don't do that.
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). Also, please note that we only request this of wedding parties and for the reasons explained above.
Just thought I'd pop in a point out that fines in a contract are perfectly enforceable in the U.S. Liquidated damages provisions are not. A $500 fine per negative review doesn't reflect the hotel's actual or liquidated damages in any way, so the provision would pass muster in court.
For example, penalties for late payments of bills are examples of contractual fines that have been upheld by the courts many times.
Whether or not the fines at issue here are bad business practice depends on how you feel about the justification for the fines.
"It's probably not legal, if it is then it is unenforceable in court, even if it was in their terms contract.
"
Could you explain why you believe this?
The main issue i would see here would be liquidated damages issues, not something like SLAPP (at least in most states).
Maybe it's the "star rating" system that's broken.
When reviewing rated product/service offerings, I go straight to the 1-star reviews. Skimming those, I differentiate the "valid complaints" from flukes (a small failure rate is understandable), unrealistic expectations (it's a vintage hotel, not a new Hilton), tangential problems (Amazon didn't smash the box, the shipper did), hysteria (political opposition isn't a reason), humor (Family Circus isn't peer-reviewed), etc.
We need a way to express these, especially a "for what it is, it's good (whether it met my needs/interests or not)".
>Maybe it's the "star rating" system that's broken.
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.
It's not just the star ratings that are broken, it's the entire hospitality system.
Having had the opportunity to take a good, long stare at the underbelly of how hotel rooms are arbitraged, marketed, booked, and how the ensuing reviews and PR is cultured, the whole damn thing is a cartel controlled by surprisingly few entities and individuals. Bookings all funnel through systems like TRX and concur, all of whom take a slice (the actual hotelier, if there is one, tends to get about as much as a recording artist in terms of percentages - and they often end up PAYING booking engines and arbiters to fill capacity), and reviews are similarly curated and controlled. There are numerous businesses whose entire function is controlling ratings for hotels and hotel groups - and they use every dirty trick in the box.
We worked on a startup which did hotel bookings in such a fashion that it circumvented this ratings cartel - and promptly had several major groups refuse to work with them, until they played the game.
It's dirty, monopolistic, and so full of anti-trust it's not funny - but lobbying.
As bad as the star system is, I'm not sure there's anything better. I think Amazon has the right idea with the "Was this review helpful to you?" buttons, though that may not work quite as well for Yelp if you consider the possibility of review-burying by owners.
Different people have different assessment criteria. That seems to be the problem the hotel in question claims to be facing. "What's best?" inherently presumes "For what?". A vintage hotel shouldn't be rated on the same criteria as a five-star downtown hotel or business hotel. Or for its healthcare, auto-repair, clothing, bookstore, or hardware characteristics. The challenge is when an entity tries to claim a special status or twist that's at strong odds to most general expectations.
Thin data. Only a small number of people typically leave reviews, and you're likely to get feedback only for exceptionally positive, or exceptionally negative, experiences. Or those who are motivated for whatever reasons (competition trying to shut you down, paid positive reviewers, etc.) to tell a specific story. This produces a highly non-randomized sampling selection.
Unqualified reviewers. This is a problem pretty much any collectively rated system has. People who are not capable of making a valid assessment. Among other services, reddit and HN are suffering from this.
The significance of ratings. Meaningless as they are, small changes in ratings can be hugely significant for a business. A major problem of the market is that information on quality is thin, non-abundant, and often expensive to come by. Ratings systems, even imperfect ones, address the ratings cost issue, even if the data conveyed are low-quality (think of racial discrimination or similar behaviors). So despite the problems, people care.
One way around these issues is to come up with a "based on your profile you'd likely prefer X". This is what Amazon tries to accomplish with its product recommendations, though the appropriateness of these is often pretty thin.
Yes. And because of this you should definitely go to Yelp and give them a one-star review. And destroy their Facebook page. And maybe go take a shit on their doorstep. That's definitely the answer when a small business makes an error like this. They're frustrated by something they don't feel is fair and made a ham-fisted attempt to fix the problem. Ruin them.
(The ice machine thing, though -- that actually seems like it's much more indicative that it might be worth staying somewhere else...)
In fairness, I'm guessing a lot of the people virtually stomping on this hotel are doing so in an attempt to nip a potential Overton window shift in the bud. If this hotel were to get away with such a policy, other hotels and perhaps other types of businesses would likely follow suit; that's how changes in what's considered normal behavior come about. Punishing the first defector can be an effective way to forestall that.
I'd call insulting people in response on the yelp page "ham-fisted", but that really seems a bit of an understatement when they're trying to charge people hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for bad reviews.
Is there any proof this is happening other than this post? I hope so otherwise internet vigilante justice is destroying a business and people's livelihoods.
Edit:
I took a look at their site and apparently they only enforce this policy for weddings:
"Also, please note that we only request this of wedding parties and for the reasons explained above."
The reasons seem to be that as guests are not booking the hotel themselves (presumably the bride/groom has done that for them) it may not be to their tastes and they feel it's unfair to leave a negative review of something you never would have booked in the first place because it's not to your taste.
I can kind of understand this reasoning, although it's not great.
Wow. Pretty bold of them to think they could fight social media and the consumer powered era with such an outrageous policy. While I am amazed at their lack of embarrassment, (especially since the policy is still up on their website), it's great to see how people can win > businesses today. Power to the people!
They appear to be backpedaling. From their Facebook page:
"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."
I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to work. They say they'll take it out of your deposit. But a review would happen after the wedding has taken place, yes?
So by then wouldn't you have paid in full and settled everything? In that case, they shouldn't have any money you would be expecting to get back from them. So what are they taking it out of? Are they just going to send you a bill for $500 per bad review? Is there anyone who will not just laugh and throw it away?
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 commenters on the post do not believe this not surprisingly.
So I agree with what appears to be the overwhelming majority that this policy is probably legally unenforceable and was destined to backfire as soon as it was posted on the interwebs, but...
I think they have a legitimate problem and I'm wandering what alternate solutions we can come up with. The person planning the wedding (may or may not be the people actually getting married) thinks this is a good place for the wedding, but many of the guests do not enjoy it. The reviews exist to help that person make that decision. Whether or not guests usually hate it, is part of that decision, but I agree with the venue that what the people getting married want is the bigger part of that decision. How can the company manage expectations better?
Doesn't matter where they claim this fee is legitimate, if the person refuses to pay (which I would), there's no way this would be upheld in civil court.
By the time you get around to reading all the fine print, you're pretty mentally committed to signing. If your bride-to-be has her heart set on the quaint old hotel, is already buying decorations to match, telling people the preliminary plans (and they're starting to book in advance), etc ... and then you get down thru the fine print, about to seal the deal, and you see an absurd "you'll be charged $500 for each negative review by people you don't control", are you REALLY going to walk away from the deal? Really?
Because they are asking you to police the comments of a third party who posts an opinion you may not have and you may not be able to convince to remove the post?
If I leave a review ~6months after would my sisters bridal party be charged or the party that is currently renting the hall?
I assume the later since they assume reviews are placed within a short span of time. Which then if there are several books one-day-after-the-next how do you migrate reviews? Or do you split the difference between all parties?
Even if the policy is clear, and the market is free. There is no way this policy can be enforced fairly.
[+] [-] dm2|11 years ago|reply
http://www.yelp.com/biz/union-street-guest-house-hudson?sort... 10 negative Yelp reviews have been posted today (so far), ouch...
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g47931-d490934-Revie...
Their website navigation is a very discrete image map in the middle of the page, http://www.unionstreetguesthouse.com/ obviously this was someone's first website.
It's probably not legal, if it is then it is unenforceable in court, even if it was in their terms contract.
Here is the page with their $500 review fee policy: http://www.unionstreetguesthouse.com/events_weddings.shtml
I don't condone leaving negative reviews if you haven't stayed there, but if you do be sure to note that you have not stayed at the hotel and are just commenting on their policies to warn people, unless that is against the review sites policy, then don't do that.
[+] [-] yread|11 years ago|reply
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). Also, please note that we only request this of wedding parties and for the reasons explained above.
[+] [-] Vik1ng|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|11 years ago|reply
For example, penalties for late payments of bills are examples of contractual fines that have been upheld by the courts many times.
Whether or not the fines at issue here are bad business practice depends on how you feel about the justification for the fines.
[+] [-] DannyBee|11 years ago|reply
Could you explain why you believe this? The main issue i would see here would be liquidated damages issues, not something like SLAPP (at least in most states).
[+] [-] dm2|11 years ago|reply
What a blatant lie, they deserve to go out of business.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101891812
Does that mean that in court everything in their contract should be considered a joke?
[+] [-] witty_username|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bigtunacan|11 years ago|reply
Coming soon: The Hotel Formerly Known as Union Street Guest House
[+] [-] frogpelt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chippy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|11 years ago|reply
When reviewing rated product/service offerings, I go straight to the 1-star reviews. Skimming those, I differentiate the "valid complaints" from flukes (a small failure rate is understandable), unrealistic expectations (it's a vintage hotel, not a new Hilton), tangential problems (Amazon didn't smash the box, the shipper did), hysteria (political opposition isn't a reason), humor (Family Circus isn't peer-reviewed), etc.
We need a way to express these, especially a "for what it is, it's good (whether it met my needs/interests or not)".
[+] [-] ben1040|11 years ago|reply
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
Having had the opportunity to take a good, long stare at the underbelly of how hotel rooms are arbitraged, marketed, booked, and how the ensuing reviews and PR is cultured, the whole damn thing is a cartel controlled by surprisingly few entities and individuals. Bookings all funnel through systems like TRX and concur, all of whom take a slice (the actual hotelier, if there is one, tends to get about as much as a recording artist in terms of percentages - and they often end up PAYING booking engines and arbiters to fill capacity), and reviews are similarly curated and controlled. There are numerous businesses whose entire function is controlling ratings for hotels and hotel groups - and they use every dirty trick in the box.
We worked on a startup which did hotel bookings in such a fashion that it circumvented this ratings cartel - and promptly had several major groups refuse to work with them, until they played the game.
It's dirty, monopolistic, and so full of anti-trust it's not funny - but lobbying.
[+] [-] peroo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|11 years ago|reply
There's no way to collapse a multidimensional metric to a single value without losing information. That's what a "star system", numeric review, or others, do. Quick, what are food grades, and what are the grading criteria? (See: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-13/business/fi-13882_1_m... and https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1977/7707/770706.PDF)
Different people have different assessment criteria. That seems to be the problem the hotel in question claims to be facing. "What's best?" inherently presumes "For what?". A vintage hotel shouldn't be rated on the same criteria as a five-star downtown hotel or business hotel. Or for its healthcare, auto-repair, clothing, bookstore, or hardware characteristics. The challenge is when an entity tries to claim a special status or twist that's at strong odds to most general expectations.
Thin data. Only a small number of people typically leave reviews, and you're likely to get feedback only for exceptionally positive, or exceptionally negative, experiences. Or those who are motivated for whatever reasons (competition trying to shut you down, paid positive reviewers, etc.) to tell a specific story. This produces a highly non-randomized sampling selection.
Unqualified reviewers. This is a problem pretty much any collectively rated system has. People who are not capable of making a valid assessment. Among other services, reddit and HN are suffering from this.
The significance of ratings. Meaningless as they are, small changes in ratings can be hugely significant for a business. A major problem of the market is that information on quality is thin, non-abundant, and often expensive to come by. Ratings systems, even imperfect ones, address the ratings cost issue, even if the data conveyed are low-quality (think of racial discrimination or similar behaviors). So despite the problems, people care.
One way around these issues is to come up with a "based on your profile you'd likely prefer X". This is what Amazon tries to accomplish with its product recommendations, though the appropriateness of these is often pretty thin.
The problem space is a hard one.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|11 years ago|reply
We're talking about Hudson, NY here. It's practically a wilderness... having an appliance repairman come would be impossible!
[+] [-] personZ|11 years ago|reply
Ice is of obvious importance, but it sounds like they did get ice, and the complaint was about the attitude concerning it.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chasing|11 years ago|reply
(The ice machine thing, though -- that actually seems like it's much more indicative that it might be worth staying somewhere else...)
[+] [-] rwallace|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|11 years ago|reply
You forgive accidental mistakes, but you should punish intentional morally unacceptable behavior.
[+] [-] untog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpape|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryoshu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wubbfindel|11 years ago|reply
Then the hacker sends pagesix.com an anonymous tip about the policy.
Then the hacker posts the pagesix.com article on HN.
Now, that would actually make a good story...
[EDIT: Typo & Grammar]
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|11 years ago|reply
Edit:
I took a look at their site and apparently they only enforce this policy for weddings:
"Also, please note that we only request this of wedding parties and for the reasons explained above."
The reasons seem to be that as guests are not booking the hotel themselves (presumably the bride/groom has done that for them) it may not be to their tastes and they feel it's unfair to leave a negative review of something you never would have booked in the first place because it's not to your taste.
I can kind of understand this reasoning, although it's not great.
[+] [-] reshambabble|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keehun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpbutler|11 years ago|reply
"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."
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Union-Street-Guest-House/1175...
[+] [-] imgabe|11 years ago|reply
So by then wouldn't you have paid in full and settled everything? In that case, they shouldn't have any money you would be expecting to get back from them. So what are they taking it out of? Are they just going to send you a bill for $500 per bad review? Is there anyone who will not just laugh and throw it away?
[+] [-] robinsta|11 years ago|reply
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 commenters on the post do not believe this not surprisingly.
[+] [-] owksley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|11 years ago|reply
I think they have a legitimate problem and I'm wandering what alternate solutions we can come up with. The person planning the wedding (may or may not be the people actually getting married) thinks this is a good place for the wedding, but many of the guests do not enjoy it. The reviews exist to help that person make that decision. Whether or not guests usually hate it, is part of that decision, but I agree with the venue that what the people getting married want is the bigger part of that decision. How can the company manage expectations better?
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrrx3|11 years ago|reply
Just because something is written into the terms of an agreement doesn't make it legal.
[+] [-] ebbv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmjohn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigzero|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] valarauca1|11 years ago|reply
If I leave a review ~6months after would my sisters bridal party be charged or the party that is currently renting the hall?
I assume the later since they assume reviews are placed within a short span of time. Which then if there are several books one-day-after-the-next how do you migrate reviews? Or do you split the difference between all parties?
Even if the policy is clear, and the market is free. There is no way this policy can be enforced fairly.