Black dealings in Blackpool

I found an interesting story this week about a hotel in Blackpool, England.

Blackpool is a slightly odd tourist town.  There are seven miles of sandy beach, but remember that this is the north-west of England.  The temperature is rarely high.  In the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, it became popular for Britons to head to the beach to swim in summer.  Blackpool grew up as a town designed entirely to cater for these tourists.  By the 1950s, there were 17 million visitors coming every year, enjoying donkey rides on the beach, riding the trams, watching the illuminations and so on.  Of course, after the 1950s, cheap air travel became available and people found they could go to beaches in places with hot weather, like Spain.  So visitor numbers to Blackpool declined, while the city tried to create more modern attractions like amusement parks with roller-coasters.  Blackpool today is an odd mix of the quaint and modern.

 So if tourism has faced challenging conditions for many years in Blackpool, I can understand that hotels might have to work harder than ever to attract customers.  Might that partly explain the following story?

A couple stopped in Blackpool for one night recently.  Their one night stay cost 36 pounds.  They paid by credit card and then went on their way.

Then, as many people do these days, they wrote a review of the hotel on a web-site.  They weren’t happy with the hotel and wrote a very negative review.

When their credit card bill arrived, they found that 136 pounds had been deducted by the hotel.  The hotel management had “fined” them 100 pounds for writing a bad review.  Actually, the guests had signed an agreement allowing the hotel to do this, although they didn’t notice it when they signed.  It had been written in the small print of the booking agreement.  It is the hotel’s policy to avoid getting bad reviews.

This has provoked a debate.  Is the hotel stifling free speech?  Is the agreement unfair on customers?  Or perhaps are some customers not careful enough to be fair to hotels or businesses when writing their reviews?  The hotel management said that many customers have started threatening to write bad reviews on the internet just to try to get a discount.

I feel a little sorry for the hotel.  After a public outcry, they had to refund the 100 pounds to the guests.  Who knows if their complaints were really fair?  The internet has given more power to people to complain.  I like using the internet to complain too, but let’s try to be fair to those we are complaining about.

Vocabulary:

to head somewhere – To go somewhere

to cater for – To serve.

to be quaint – To be old-fashioned, but in a pleasant way; to be charming.

to be deducted – To be removed, or taken off.             

to fine somebody – To charge money to somebody as a penalty.

the small print – The details in an agreement which is written in very small letters.

to provoke something – To cause something.

to stifle something – To restrict something’s freedom, or ability to move or grow.

an outcry – When many people complain loudly.