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."
The card charges 30 pounds fee to refund it, and the hotel loses the money and the fee.
Do that often enough and the hotel will lose the right to take credit cards, because the card companies don't want scams like this.
A hotel that can't take credit cards will lose most of their business very quickly.
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 owners of this hotel are no doubt becoming familiar with the Streisand effect right now. OTOH, £36 for a hotel room? What did they expect? I know it's Blackpool, but still, no one should expect much for £36 pounds.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
While crap like this is obviously bogus, one easy way to short-circuit it is to simply never use your real name on any of these review sites.
If they can't identify you, they can't extort you. Especially if you use a pseudonym that is really common like say William Brown or John Williams.
BROADWAY HOTEL SUCKS
You were lucky! Instead of breakfast they gave me a green paste of dubious origin. The room had no shower, if you wanted to get clean you had to stand under the rain. On the bright side, the holes in the roof helped do that while staying in. On the other hand, there were no windows, just holes in the wall (on one of the three standing walls, the fourth one was just a hole into the abyss.
Of my two sons, one disappeared after going to the kitchen for dinner. We had to sell the other to pay the fine for this review.
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.
Checks (cheques, this being a British hotel) do still exist, but yeah, that would still be pretty much a death knell. The only time I don't pay for a hotel online (with my credit card) is if I'm in a place so remote I either don't get cell signal or they aren't listed on the online booking sites. Even in most of those places, though, I pay with my card. The only time in the last decade I've paid cash for lodging was a few "tea houses" in the Himalayas, most of which didn't even have electricity (maybe one solar panel, battery, and a light over the kitchen/dining area).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
We have had them for years here. They are tied to my account, and in and every need, I create a separate one with the limit of the value I want to pay. You can create one for single use, or one with a validity of one year for being charge by a single merchant. The advantage of the process is that you place a roof on the limit. Yeah, I am paying a 50 euro charge, maybe I create a card with 51 euros. Last time a big hotel here asked a VISA card just to book my parents, but on the conditions said "this will be only used if the guests do not show up"...well, I created a virtual VISA with 5 EUROS. First thing my parents heard from the idiots "Your VISA card is not working". Even my Apple account is tied to a virtual VISA card with a small amount..The scheme has existed here for almost decade, and it well tested and proven to work.
There are exceptions--contracts can't violate the law, for example. But they can still be written to unreasonably favor one party, and usually are.
That's the point. I don't know British law, but in Spain only public Administrations are allowed to set fines (by application of existing law). I understand a hotel can only charge you for any service thay have provided, mini-bar, etc., which is not the case.
Even if the hotel says you broke something in your room it is quite arguable they could charge it to your credit card. That's what lawyers (and insurances) are intended for.
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.
BROADWAY HOTEL SUCKS
You were lucky! Instead of breakfast they gave me a green paste of dubious origin. The room had no shower, if you wanted to get clean you had to stand under the rain. On the bright side, the holes in the roof helped do that while staying in. On the other hand, there were no windows, just holes in the wall (on one of the three standing walls, the fourth one was just a hole into the abyss.
Of my two sons, one disappeared after going to the kitchen for dinner. We had to sell the other to pay the fine for this review.
"Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!"
"Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! Hotel? Huh."
Cheques are notoriously bad for guaranteed payment - businesses would only accept a cheque if your bank also issued you with a cheque guarantee card (usually just a different design on your debit card), which means the bank would guarantee to cash the cheque up to a certain amount, taking the matter up with the writer of the cheque if it bounced. If you tried to cash a cheque without a guarantee (or a cheque over the guarantee amount) and it bounces, you are SOL and have to take it up with the writer yourself.
And cheque guarantees usually only went up to a few hundred quid.
Car dealers would typically want a bankers draft, which is a bit of paper issued by your bank for a specific amount and is treated as cash - the value is held on the paper, its not an instruction to transfer money, its an actual promissory note just like paper note cash is. Lose the bankers draft, and the money is gone, you can't get it back.
Bankers drafts cost you money to buy, and you have to go to a bank to have one issued.
To avoid this 'charge', would it be enough to just wait until you've checked-out before posting your review? Or would they charge your card even then?
Maybe I just missed it in the comments, but: here is the TripAdvisor page for the hotel.
Luxury. We had to sleep in their septic tank. 25 of us and for breakfust we just got a lump of poisen.
And you try and tell the young people today that and they wont believe you!
...
Is that in the UK? Never heard of that before, and certainly never came across it in the UK - if you don't have a guarantee card, the cheque would be refused, it was that simple.
is the owner's name Fawlty, by any chance?
Retail or not, contracts are binding.
Contracts tend to be binding even when both parties don't read--most contracts are not read but are binding
Are you sure about that? Note the following (from the American Law Institute):
Where the other party has reason to believe that the party manifesting such assent would not do so if he knew that the writing contained a particular term, the term is not part of the agreement.
i.e. if you put terms into a contract that you know your customers aren't likely to agree to, then they're not binding, even if the contract is signed.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
They must do it on purpose: set up a crap hotel, put the 100 pound fine in the small print: profit!
At http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/H... the place has 147 "terrible" ratings and 24 "poor" == 17100 pounds (about $26800) (!)
If they're smart they'll diversify: Bad review on tripadvisor: 100 pounds. Badmouthing tweet to 1000 followers or more: 500 pounds. Negative letter to paper: 500 pounds and 20 lashes. Bad review in paper: you forfeit all your bank accounts.
All hotels should do this. The Great Hotel Vengeance of 2015. In fact all reviews of any book, film, hotel, ebay seller, etc. should be included. Ah well anybody who says anything bad about anything ever. 100 pounds please.
In the UK, national trading standards laws trump point-of-sale contracts in retail transactions.
Laws trump contracts pretty much everywhere and in every circumstance.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
In most of Europe, law specifically requires contracts in common situations like booking a stay with a hotel that have "unusual terms" for the terms to be specifically and carefully explained. The burden of proof that explanation was delivered and appropriate lies with the one inserting these clauses (in this case hotel) and even if this was found to be true, court would still likely strike it down as illegal because of power balance in this case (customer arriving with expectation of a place to stay, hotel in a position of power because it holds the room guest has expected behind unreasonable contractual terms).
Reminder: Most of Europe is far more consumer-centric than wild west capitalism of US.
Which already happened:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
As I said, hotel folded instantly.
take a lawyer with you every time you bought groceries.
But that would make a great Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch.
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' ".