Slashdot Mirror
UK Hotel Adds Hefty Charge For Bad Reviews Online
Bizzeh writes: A British couple has been "fined" £100 by a Blackpool hotel for leaving critical comments on Trip Advisor. The UK's Trading Standards organization is investigating the incident, saying it may breach regulations. The Broadway Hotel's booking policy reads (in small print), "Despite the fact that repeat customers and couples love our hotel, your friends and family may not. "For every bad review left on any website, the group organizer will be charged a maximum £100 per review."
BROADWAY HOTEL SUCKS
Come and take your 100 pounds for this.
Streisand Effect anyone?
Last review from tripadvisor:
"I spent two nights for my son's 18th birthday at this hotel, but had I read the reviews 1st I wouldn't of stayed at this hotel. The breakfast was disgusting, the tables and cutlery were filthy and the dining room looked as it hadn't seen a hoover in months. In our bedroom the shower head was useless cause you had to hold it yourself as the holder on the wall was broken also I don't think they clean the showers regular cause it was filthy, we couldn't turn the TV on, the floor was dirty. In my son's room he couldn't turn the heating off so had to be too hot all night "
The couple have sought a refund via their credit card company.
FTA
The chargeback processing fee is charged regardless. I use to be on the receiving end of chargebacks and my credit card processor would charge this no matter what. The hotel can challenge it, but the money remains frozen until resolved.
What the hotel is trying to do here is create a 100 pound fee that can get around the UK Chargeback rule, that limited the automatic right to a chargeback to items costing less than 100 pounds.
However the automatic right within law isn't why you get a chargeback, its the credit card company discretion that gives you it. The law was an extra protection added, but chargebacks were prior to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback
So ask, the credit card company will refund, this is clearly an unsustainable charge, and they should also raise it with the major hotel booking companies, because their review system is being attacked here, and their conditions of inclusion for the hotel are being broken.
Get the hotel kicked from Booking.com Apodo and the rest and it will be gone from memory quick enough.
Pretty much no larger business accepts cheques these days in the UK, and hasn't for several years - cheques have essentially been relegated to inter-personal transactions or smaller business (single person style businesses) because of the cost of handling them as a business.
Despite what the Republicans are trying to tell you regulating businesses is not the same as communism.
I was told there was nothing I could do.
It looks like you need to use a better card payment service. Although the chargeback system is certainly horribly biased against honest merchants and vulnerable to abuse, you can still dispute any chargeback, and any serious card payment service will surely provide for this.
Also worth knowing:
1. Some payment services these days will waive the chargeback fee if you successfully defend the charge.
2. If you use 3-D Secure to authenticate the buyer, then chargeback liability shifts to the financial companies rather than you as the merchant under most circumstances.
So the situation here is at least a bit better for honest merchants than it used to be.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In many parts of the world you're not required to read contracts. Items that are not part of a standard contract are not enforceable unless separated and signed on their own.
So: It is expected that a hotel charges me for the minibar and damage to the room. It is unexpected and not even remotely standard practice that they charge me for leaving a bad review. Hence when I sign on the dotted line I agree to standard terms. This is backed by case law in several parts of the world, and I think the UK included.
In Australia it was to do with a postal worker having people sign over the deeds to the house when dropping off a package.
Maybe I just missed it in the comments, but: here is the TripAdvisor page for the hotel.
For a country "without free speech", we do pretty well and I can get away with ten times more than I could ever do in the US.
The hotel were talked to by Trading Standards, and have immediately revoked the policy (because it was legally dubious right from the outset). They are currently being spoken to also about refunding this "fine" despite the idiots signing a piece of paper that says they agreed with it (which is also legally dubious). And there doesn't need to be any change in the law because already, by the laws that exist, including by default many EU laws that do include free speech, the area is more than well enough covered, thanks.
The reason it makes news is not because it's legal to do what the hotel did. It absolutely is not legal. It's because it's OUTRAGEOUS to even try, given the current laws. And they are quickly finding that out in more ways than just the Streisand Effect as they now have a lot of lawyers and government departments breathing down their necks.
There is nothing whatsoever in law that gives the hotel the right to do this, only the opposite, and no need for explicitly stating this beyond the existing laws. UK laws do not explicitly enshrine a number of things, like the "official" language of the country, the rights of free speech, etc. because they are just automatically entrenched in the law and the case law.
We don't have a "You have the right to say anything" law because we haven't needed one. You have pretty much the same rights as anywhere else in the EU, and a damn sight more rights than the US.
Remember the UK "super-injunctions" that supposedly stopped people talking about the very existence of another court injunction? It went down the pan because the media basically ignored it, made it front-page news for several months and then exposure of their existence meant they were dead - legally speaking - from that point. I can't imagine US media fighting like that for a second.
And the UK's defamation laws? We gave them to the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
They've been through changes, and a number of high profile cases lately have resulted in changes, but asking someone who says you're a paedophile to prove so (and not be unchallengeable in court unless you can prove you're not) is not the end of free speech. And all those laws have been fixed for quite a while now.
You cannot, and cannot ever have been, successfully sued for your reasonable opinion, in any first-world country in modern times. What you can have been is defamed with absolute untruths and then had the defamer hiding behind "his opinion". That's always been true in any system.
Hence, as a Brit, I've never been one to hold back on forums, or otherwise. The threat to me is zero. I'm either clearly expressing an opinion or stating fact, and you cannot ever have been successfully sued for that.
The problem with the US is that they think they are a free country. However, whenever I've been there people are shocked at the opinions I express, the way I express them, and friends have honestly believed that I would get into trouble for expressing them. Yet, in the UK, if anything I'm considered quite passive.
The UK defamation laws give this place NO RIGHT whatsoever to block reviews of their business, nor to charge for them. Hence why the policy has been revoked on the same day and why government departments are "in discussions" with the hotel. That's English politeness for "We're currently explaining the law to them, and won't stop explaining it until we have to take them to court or they stop doing it of their own 'free will' ".