LEAVE A NEGATIVE COMMENT AND PAY A $500 FINE

     This past weekend, my fiancee and I drove up to a little town in upstate New York called Spencertown, where my uncle owns a weekend home, to spend time with my family. On the way up, we drove through what seemed like an amazing and quaint little town called Hudson, NY. I've never been to Hudson, but as we drove through, it seemed like a place that my fiancee and I would visit. That's until I read this story! 

     So, it turns out; a rustic New York inn has been under attack by Internet users following claims that the inn fines brides and grooms $500 for negative online reviews left by their guests. The now growing attacks against Union Street Guest House in Hudson followed a since-removed disclaimer on its website that issued the authoritarian-like rule against bad publicity for the inn. 

     The policy read: "If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at Union Street Guest House, there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from every negative review of Union Street Guest House placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event." WHAT? That is ridiculous! So, now they are bullying people into leaving good reviews? If the service is bad, the service is bad. There would be no bad reviews if these people knew how to treat their clientele. This is horrible!

     In an attempt for a sensible alternative, the policy stated that if the negative review was removed, their guest's $500 fee would be returned. Needless to say, when others found out about this policy from the hotel that bills itself as "an icon of the Hudson Valley," they've garnished extremely negative online reviews. By Monday evening, nearly 15-pages of one-star reviews has plastered the inn's listing on Yelp. Their Facebook page earned a similar amount of negative comments before being completely deleted from the site.

     One Yelp user wrote: "If you don't want bad reviews, provide amazing service. Having a policy that fines people for expressing their opinion of the service is unbelievable. The Internet is not controlled by your organization." According to a statement reportedly posted on their Facebook page, but has since been taken down, the hotel suggested that the policy, which used to be on the page, was all just a joke: "The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago. It was meant to be taken down long ago and certainly never enforced." What kind of joke is that? A review posted on Yelp about the hotel back in November 2013, appeared to suggest otherwise: "The manager of this hotel had the gall to email us twice to threaten us financially about the negative review!" No comment from the Inn regarding this post. 

     I mean really? What happened to "Freedom of Speech"? Did we forget that already? Did the British win the Revolutionary War, where we are still taxed on everything including bad Internet reviews? Because that's what this reminds me of. How dare this place charge a fine for people who express their opinions about their establishment. They can either respond to the negative comments or fix what's broken in your shop because if you're receiving negative reviews, you're obviously doing something wrong! Needless to say, now it seems like a good idea that we didn't choose to get married up there because Union Street Guest House might have been one of the Inns that our guests might have stayed at.