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Comment by zorrb | Hacker News Reader

"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."

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I actually kinda see where they're coming from. I'm sure they do get complaints from people who never stay anywhere besides upscale chain hotels. But obviously this is not the way to address the issue. It's mean and ultimately self-defeating.

A piece of paper asking guests to keep this in mind when giving reviews would suffice.

A company that threatens to fine me for giving them a negative review is much more likely to actually receive a negative review from me.

A company that threatens to fine me for giving them a negative review is much more likely to actually receive a negative review from me.

And a company that actually fines me would be much more likely to receive a chargeback, formal complaints to any relevant regulators, or even for that kind of money a small claims suit.

I'm not really sure how they expect to win with this policy, particularly since they're presumably about to get more negative publicity than every bad review they ever avoided and searching for them on-line will probably lead to dozens of critical comments forever now.

I agree. If they are offering something unique and unusual, it is their problem to ensure that the guests are educated. And, guess what? If guests don't like it, they need to change their strategy and modernize.

Yes this is true, but this is the wrong way to do it. I have stayed at many places reviewed badly by people who just do not get it. Like I stayed at a wonderful rustic place in Maine [1] but there were quite a few reviews complaining about the rustic nature and giving them one star. As a human being I can then read these reviews and decide that the people rating it one star were expecting that this should have been some 5 star modern hotel or Sandals. This happens with restaurants too as some people do not take into account the cost/location of a restaurant in reviews "I have had better burritos in San Diego, zero stars!" when reviewing a Tex-Mex place in New Jersey.

Bottom line is that people are smart enough to filter out bad reviews.

1. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g40525-Boothbay_Harbor_Mai...

> Bottom line is that people are smart enough to filter out bad reviews.

The problem is that the software generally filters first - e.g. "show me the 'best of'" or "sort by top rated". If you're looking at a selection of hundreds of items, I don't know that your statement holds.

It's the "scalar fallacy."

In a nutshell, the scalar fallacy is the false but pervasive assumption that real-world things (hotels, sandwiches, people, mutual funds, chemo drugs, whatever) have some single-dimension ordering of "goodness".

When you project a multi-dimensional space down to one dimension, you are involving a lot of context and preferences in the act of projecting. Just sayin'.

This is a general problem with reviews. If it’s written text it’s often possible to figure out whether a certain criticism is valid for you personally.

Some people are very sensitive to wait times, I’m just not at all. I can always discount all reviews complaining about wait times because there isn’t enough useful signal there. Sure, even I don’t want to wait three hours for my food, but most people seem to complain way before that and that’s just not relevant information to me.

Contrary, when people tell me what a great experience they had with the staff and that the owner came to their table and chatted with them I know I should probably avoid that restaurant because I just can’t stand any staff or owners acting like they are my best friends immediately.

So, sure, for written reviews it’s often possible to see whether a criticism is relevant for your own personal tastes, but all those review places also implement star ratings and those are used to display and filter the places you are shown in the first place. So you might not even see a place you like because it got bad ratings based on (completely valid, by the way, I’m not saying other people have to also be as tolerant of wait times as I am!) factors you personally don’t care about.

This affects other places as well, for example apps in app stores. I’m not sure how to solve this, to be honest, but that seems like a cool problem to tackle. I’m imagining Netflix-like personalised lists of restaurants or hotels you might like, not these dumb global star ratings.

Does this already exist somewhere? I feel like it should. Surely someone must have already tried that …

>when people tell me what a great experience they had with the staff and that the owner came to their table and chatted with them

This tends to be a part of a broad cultural expectation. Americans tend to equate "good service" with [fake] niceness and obligated smiles and cheeriness. Some other cultures are different where good service means simply doing your job. I can't count how many times people have gone to other countries and complained about the "poor service" and "everyone is rude here" not even considering cultural differences.

The US has gone insane in that respect with obligated "niceties."

Now when I go to Walgreens they say to me after any transaction "be well." Seriously? Like I believe the cashier ringing up my candy and soda purchase personally cares about my well being and health? Or that it is adding anything of value to the transaction?

> Now when I go to Walgreens they say to me after any transaction "be well." Seriously? Like I believe the cashier ringing up my candy and soda purchase personally cares about my well being and health? Or that it is adding anything of value to the transaction?

Its a corporate slogan with tie-ins to Walgreen's marketing and branding. Like most aspects of branding, its not designed to operate at the level of rational thought and analysis at all. Its more like the use of corporate colors and logos on retail employees uniforms, but in auditory rather than visual form.

Doesn't make it less obnoxious. (to me)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_nice_day#.22Have_a_Nice_...

Perhaps they could have sent a gift voucher to the wedding couple for every negative review, including a message that you wanted a "vintage" inn and we provided the best service we could, but your guests weren't happy. It could probably guilt the wedding couple to request the guests to take the reviews down. And, perhaps led to a positive story on HN instead.

Paying people for negative reviews probably isn't the best strategy.

Maybe in a larger sense Yelp is working.

The people paying for the rooms are unhappy with them. They leave negative reviews. Perhaps the next wedding couple doesn't dig into the reviews and just skips over that place in favor of somewhere the guests will enjoy more. So the reviewers end up benefiting future would-be-customers, albeit indirectly.

If the hotel doesn't like this dynamic they can simply refuse to book wedding parties.

And that's the reason (in my opinion) online reviews are borderline worthless. Everyone has different expectations and preferences. Also - a lot of people are completely unreasonable. Unreasonable people are more likely to leave a negative review than a reasonable random joe to leave a positive review.

I stayed at a hotel where the reviews were almost all negative with comments like "the furniture was outdated and the TV was a CRT."

What to I care about in a hotel? A clean bed to sleep on and a shower. That's it. I stay at hotels just to sleep in and wash up.

My apartment building rents out its first floor for events, often to weddings, and I've also noticed there's a tendency for guests to review things that really have nothing to do with us: how the event was organized, how the band sounded, whether the cake was good, and so on.

That doesn't mean, obviously, that we try to fine anyone for those reviews. We trust people reading reviews will realize when complaints don't make sense, and have good reviews that outweigh the bad.

Actually, that I can understand.

If we were in an understanding world the guests who wouldn't normally go to a place like that (and won't/don't enjoy it) but are because it is part of a big event like a wedding, would not leave bad reviews on that basis on the understanding that it is what the bride/groom/others wanted and they are happy.

But we are not in such a world and there are people out there who will leave a bad review because they went to somewhere they would never like on its own merits and don't like it...

I can't say I like their way of dealing with it and can see why people are up in arms, but I can see the problem that they are trying to protect themselves from.

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