So, it was all a joke. When Hudson, NY’s Union Street Guest House notified guests, “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.”
Asked to explain this to Page Six, which first broke the story, the hotel’s proprietors at first declined to say anything. (Lesson 1 in the crisis manual: Don’t ignore bad news.)
Then, still refusing to speak on the record even after the story went viral, the hoteliers offered this defense: The policy was “meant to be tongue-in-cheek . . . We like to have fun. We’re not trying to screw people over. We have five rooms. It was never meant to be some horrible rule.”
OK, so your transparently and viciously horrible rule wasn’t “meant” to be a horrible rule. Your attempt to rob your own guests in multiples of $500 wasn’t “screwing people over.” It was actually “fun”! Just another form of entertainment. Like Ebola!
And by the way, you have five rooms! (Not 11? Not four? Who cares?)
Idea: Union Street Guest House of Hudson, NY, rename yourself The Instant Karma Inn.
That would a) show a sense of humor; and b) possibly save your business, which under its present name and management is about as viable as selling rotary-dial phones.
The saga reads like it dates from the bleary dawn of the Web era — 1995, say. Because it’s been about that long since anybody smart enough to run a business with gross sales of 25 cents a year or more has been this dumb about the Web.
Union Street Guest House actually thought it could play whack-a-mole: Exterminate bad reviews ruthlessly, one by one, using threats, instead of dealing with the underlying problems and creating happy customers who will leave good reviews.
Now people are stampeding to Yelp to unload nastygrams on Union Street. The little B&B thought it was silencing naysayers by handing out megaphones.
Some of the new one-star reviews that have emerged seem chillingly plausible: “I stayed here as part of a group attending a wedding in 2013. I wanted to leave a negative review then and would have done it if the $500 threat was leveled at me, because I’d like to see someone try to take $500 from me for leaving a bad review. However, the threat was far more insidious — they threatened to withhold $500 from the deposit left by the couple getting married. I felt they didn’t need or deserve that hassle, so I left it alone. Until now.”
Other critiques seem to fall under the category of “creative writing.” (“Needless to say that I was shocked and appalled when my 13-year-old niece was thrown into a pit of used hypodermic needles.”)
But, hey, Union Street told us all it had a sense of humor, right? We know this place is all about the “tongue-in-cheek,” so no problem there. To get a big merry chuckle out of the whole nutty staff, try taking $500 out of their cash register. It’ll be hilarious!
Long before the Web came around, businesses used to tell each other, “The customer is always right.” Now the customer is not only right, he’s armed.
Social media is like that old desktop toy that said, “Complaint department, take a number,” with a numbered tag attached to the pin of a hand grenade. Only instead of the customer getting blown to smithereens, it’s your business that disappears in a cloud of smoke.
As commenter Matthew K. from Los Angeles put it on Yelp, “It is just a genuinely awful place to stay. Welcome to the 21st century Union Street.”
Life is unfair, but Yelp is sweet fancy justice. Union Street Guest House, when the “out of business” sign goes up on your front door, we’ll all give that development a five-star rave.