This one is so sad that it’s funny! The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool apparently charged a couple £100 via their credit card because they posted a negative review of their stay there on Trip Advisor. The hotel even had it written as a clause in their small print that they would make such a charge if anyone said bad things about them.
If you look them up on Trip Advisor, Broadway Hotel has a 2-star rating, placing them in 858th position out of 894 hotels in the area. Out of 256 reviews, over 200 customers rated them as “average” or worse (147 rated them “terrible”). Assuming they charged all of the “terrible” voters £100, the hotel will have netted a cool £15k – or over £25k if they didn’t like being rated as anything other than “fantastic”.
As it turns out, Broadway Hotel has now scrapped the “fine” clause after Trading Standards went sniffing around. There is no mention of any refunds, though. The wording in the article clearly states that they will stop doing it “in the future”. However, by implication this means they shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place, which implies in turn that any “fines” already levied were invalid.
The reason it’s so funny is that you really couldn’t have ended up with a worse review as a result of trying to engineer a good one. Even better is the fact that my neighbour’s cat could have sussed that such a ploy was wrong on just about every front imaginable, and that it was only a matter of time before it backfired on whoever thought of it. And you can’t help wonder why Broadway Hotel didn’t put as much energy into just fixing the problems as it did trying to hide them through what would be tantamount to extortion if you wrote it into a film script.
extortion
Law. the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one’s office or authority.
The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under colo[u]r of official right.
It remains to be seen if this is the end of the matter now that it is clear Broadway Hotel was overstepping its mark.