Hotel fines guests $500 for every bad review they leave on Yelp

It can be pretty stressful to run a business in the age of online reviews. A few short sentences on Yelp can be all it takes for an unsatisfied customer to irreparably tarnish the reputation of a business, even when it’s the customer in question who is causing the issue. A hotel in Hudson, New York has demonstrated exactly how NOT to deal with this problem.

The Union Street Guest House (USGH) hotel went about solving this issue by charging couple who booked rooms for their weddings a $500 fee for every bad review that they or their guests published 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.”

After the policy was brought to the attention of the public and was picked up by several news outlets, people began expressing their outrage at the hotel’s audacity. In response, the hotel took to Facebook to claim that the rule was simply an inside joke at the hotel and was never actually enforced.

“The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago,” the Facebook post read. “It was meant to be taken down and certainly was never enforced.”

The Facebook post was eventually taken down as well, shortly after former customers came out claiming that the hotel had, in fact, enforced or threatened to enforce this policy during their stay. Despite the hotel’s attempts at damage control, over 600 people have taken to Yelp to give the hotel the lowest possible rating it can achieve.

Read more about the story at Business Insider.