Hotel fines guests $500 for posting bad reviews online

Elite Yelpers, be warned: A hotel in Hudson, New York, will fine you for posting a negative review of your stay anywhere online.

Here's how the Union Street Guest House, a historic inn in the Catskill mountains and popular lodging choice for wedding parties, describes its policy for online reviews:

Since the New York Post's Page Six picked up on the policy in a post this morning, USGH has quietly removed a portion of their "Reviews Policy," which read as such:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Page Six readers, many of whom were never guests of the hotel, have since flooded the inn's Yelp page to defiantly write negative reviews. "Well that kinda backfired, didn't it?" wrote one Yelper. "You are charging $500 for bad reviews. Do you consider offering a reward of $500 for good reviews?" wrote another.

While the flood of frantic poor reviews may eventually be scrubbed from Union Street Guest House's Yelp page (Yelp, Fast Company notes, is pretty good about removing fake and/or troll-y reviews), it may still be hard for the business to recover. Thankfully, though, one Yelper is optimistic. --Samantha Rollins

(h/t Yelp, Fast Company)