What Can I Say?

I’m not sure how much I can add to the stories you’ve already seen going around the Internet about the hotel in Upstate New York that is supposedly charging wedding parties a $500 fee for each negative review posted about their establishment on Yelp. If this story is true – and it has been repeated on a number of legitimate news channels, as well as being mocked on the Tonight Show (among others) and no one is suing yet – then it’s an incredibly bad move in terms of both customer service and public relations. The hotel is claiming that it was merely a joke, made in reference to a guest complaint from years ago, but anyone who has ever spent a day working in any customer contact position could have told them that you don’t even joke about such things. Especially now, when any stupid prank you make could end up being shared with literally everyone in the world who has access to a computer. But from where I’m sitting the real questions are what to do about a public relations crisis of this magnitude – and will any of it matter?

First of all, it seems clear that whoever is running the hotel needs help with his or her advertising and website design, and should probably consider investing in assistance from one of the small firms that consult on such matters. People are always reluctant to do this, and I’ve never been sure of why. What is wrong with seeking help from someone whose professional knowledge of a critical aspect of your business is greater than your own? In this case it does seem a bit like closing the barn after the horse has run off, but it’s still better than standing in the open doorway looking like an imbecile. At the very least, the hotel management could check over their files to see if any former guest has ever been hit with a “negative Yelp reviews” fee – or even threatened with one for real – and then provide an apology and a refund of the $500. They should probably also have some competent third party go over their website and make sure there’s nothing else on it that could set people off…

The bigger issue is that once a story like this goes viral it can be incredibly difficult to kill off. There has never been any truth to the Neiman-Marcus cookie story, for example; at the time this canard began making its way around the Internet the company didn’t even sell cookies. Yet this remains one of the more common urban legends online over a decade after Snopes.com (among others) completely debunked it. The hotel probably doesn’t have the funds to take out full-page ads in a major newspaper denying the story, and so far denials online and in social media don’t seem to be helping. Reaching out directly to every past customer they can find and apologizing to anyone they actually charged for the negative reviews might help; explaining it was a joke and promising that they would never really do any such thing might help if they didn’t actually charge anyone. But their best bet is probably a mixture of competence and time…

The other side effect of the Internet age is a very low attention span – and a very short news cycle. By this time next week some other outrageous thing will probably have happened, and everyone in cyberspace will be off mocking someone else. If the hotel takes down anything online that could be considered rude, weird, or unfriendly, refunds any charges they have to, and makes a point of taking care of all future guests – whether they gave good reviews on Yelp or not – they might be able to live through the firestorm and rebuild their brand and their client base the old-fashioned way: one relationship at a time…

Unless they really are trying to cover up for substandard service by trying to suppress any bad reviews…