Silly season story No: 2 - the hotel that charges if you post a negative review

The silly season just got sillier.

Maybe the time this article was posted is material?

There are lessons to be learned, even from a non-story like this one. Read the article in the New York Post here, their Yelp page here and their TripAdvisor page here. Here we go...

• If you have a sense of humour, keep it offline. Yelpers (especially) and some TripAdvisor reviewers are bound not to share it
• There are some angry people out there with a lot of time on their hands - and they can do serious harm to your business. Just check out the 'helpful' votes that the last review has garnered...

• Don't respond to reviews online as you would person-to-person, just apologise, explain and invite the reviewer to return (by the time we'd read the third excuse for their dogs getting loose, even we were convinced that their guesthouse was shortlisted for a re-make of American Werewolf) 
• Don't rely on guests 'reading the small print', not if you value your online reputation. If there's anything they need to know make absolutely sure they've read it, to the extent of getting them to confirm that they've done so and agreed in writing

And Facebook works both ways as well (to be frank, neither TripAdvisor, Yelp nor Facebook come out of this saga smelling of roses)...

Or you can get Dialogue working for you and get back to running a great hotel.