These days, reviews and consumer comments online mean quite a bit to any business. If consumers have a great experience and want to share it with their friends and others, they can now do it with the click of a button. On the flip side, if they have a bad experience, they can let everyone know that pretty quickly too! As a result that the internet has give consumers a way to gauge what it is they’re buying, whether it be a product or service, before actually purchasing it; and more often than not, people use reviews to help them make buying decisions.
With all of that said, I find it incredible how far some business owners are willing to go in order to solicit positive reviews. Some give away free items, enter consumers into drawings when they leave a review, some even give away cash, coupons, and more! However, there’s one hotel that’s got to have the most aggressive, yet worst way of soliciting positive reviews. That company is Union Street Guest House.
According To The NY Times…
The NY Times reports that Union Street Guest House charges wedding guests $500 for every negative review left online on sites like Yelp by a member of their party. Although their policy on reviews may be the same, shortly after this post on the NY Times, Union Street Guest House made their reviews policy “Only available via email”. Before the change, their site read…
“Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our inn, your friends and families may not,” reads an online policy. “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.”
Today, it reads…
“Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our Inn, your friends and families may not. This is due to the fact that your guests may not understand what we offer – therefore we expect you to explain that to them. USGH & Hudson are historic. The buildings here are old (but restored). Our bathrooms and kitchens are designed to look old in an artistic “vintage” way. Our furniture is mostly hip, period furniture that you would see in many design magazines. (although comfortable and functional – obviously all beds are brand new) If your guests are looking for a Marriott type hotel they may not like it here…
We do not discuss our policy, availability or rates on site. All correspondence for a wedding must be done via email so that each of us has a clear record of our agreement.”
As you can see from the quote “We do not discuss our policy…on site”, chances are that the policy hasn’t changed one bit. The only thing that’s most likely changed is what they choose to display on their site.
Did This CRAZY Policy Work?
Thankfully, the average consumer isn’t much of a fan of being bullied. As a result, not only did this policy not work, it completely ruined their reputation on Yelp and many other review websites. Here are a couple of screenshots I found to be most interesting…
What We Can Learn From This
The great thing about business is that often times, mistakes made by other businesses are published for the world to see. This makes learning from the mistakes of others pretty easy. Now, I’m not sure if this was a mistake, or a blatant disregard for freedom of speech, but we can definitely learn quite a bit from USGS’ policy on reviews. Here are the key takeaways…
- Don’t Bully Your Customers - It’s obvious from consumer reviews that Union Street Guest House has poor customer service. Instead of working on that, they’ve decided to try and bully their customers into avoiding the review process all together or leaving something positive. No one likes a bully!
- Learn From Reviews - Instead of trying to bully customers into leaving a positive review or not leaving one at all, read the reviews that people are leaving. If your hotel rooms smell like mold, find the problem and fix it! If your customers complain about bad service, figure out who provided the bad service and reprimand as necessary. The simple fact is that reviews aren’t just for consumers; they’re also there to help us get better as businesses!
- Reviews Are Important - This company did one thing right; they realized the importance of reviews. Although USGS has an incredibly abusive reviews policy, they remind us that for local businesses, reviews mean quite a bit! So, it’s best to solicit them, and do it in a positive way!
Final Thoughts
Are you interested in getting more reviews? Make sure to sign up for as many local directories as possible to give your customers plenty of places to leave their reviews. You can even start by signing up for our FREE local directory!
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