{"id":16527,"date":"2014-11-19T12:44:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T12:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=16527"},"modified":"2014-11-19T12:44:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T12:44:38","slug":"broadway-hotel-charged-customer-100-for-negative-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=16527","title":{"rendered":"Broadway Hotel Charged Customer £100 For Negative Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

This one is so sad that it\u2019s funny! The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool apparently charged a couple \u00a3100 via their credit card<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

If you look them up on Trip Advisor<\/a>, 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 \u201caverage\u201d or worse (147 rated them \u201cterrible\u201d). Assuming they charged all of the \u201cterrible\u201d voters \u00a3100, the hotel will have netted a cool \u00a315k – or over \u00a325k if they didn\u2019t like being rated as anything other than \u201cfantastic\u201d.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Broadway Hotel has now scrapped the \u201cfine\u201d clause after Trading Standards<\/a> went sniffing around. There is no mention of any refunds, though. The wording in the article clearly states that they will stop doing it \u201cin the future\u201d. However, by implication this means they shouldn\u2019t have been doing it in the first place, which implies in turn that any \u201cfines\u201d already levied were invalid.<\/p>\n

The reason it\u2019s so funny is that you really couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t help wonder why Broadway Hotel didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n

extortion<\/p>\n

Law. the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one’s office or authority.<\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It remains to be seen if this is the end of the matter now that it is clear Broadway Hotel was overstepping its mark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This one is so sad that it\u2019s funny! The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool apparently charged a couple \u00a3100 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[99,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-related","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t