Suing Over A Bad Review?!? Come On!!!

While checking out other travel related websites to get ideas for how to improve/drive more traffic to this site, I stumbled upon this news article (http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,28318,26197059-5014090,00.html) about the potential for travelers who post bad reviews of hotels on the web to be sued by the hotel for defamation!  Is it just me, or does this sound crazy?!?!?

I think the idea of suing someone for posting a bad review about your business is as preposterous as that lawsuit oh so long ago against McDonald’s for the coffee being too hot.  Actually, that lawsuit probably had more merit than any of these will.  Why would anyone use review sites if only good things were posted???  What’s the point of having the Internet and the ability to share our thoughts and opinions if we can’t share the good and the bad?

As I mentioned in my last blog, I no longer trust the reviews on hostels.com and hostelbookers.com because they allow the proprietor to delete certain reviews.  My firsthand experience with these websites is that, after spending a good chunk of time to write a review, most of the bad reviews I’ve written got deleted after a few weeks.  So now I’ve switched to Tripadvisor where comments and reviews are moderated and once they are put up, they stay up! 

Some people argue that businesses should have the right to sue because false reviews gets posted, but out of all the reviews I’ve read, I’ve only seen one that looked like it could be fake (and it was a positive review).  In our 9 months of travel so far, anywhere we’ve stayed that’s been mind-blowingly awesome has had mostly all good reviews (you can never please everyone!).  Likewise, anywhere we’ve had a bad experience, there were a number of bad reviews, and those reviews were accurate or similar to our experience to some degree. 

Besides, on a site like Tripadvisor, the management can always write a response to the bad review, and it gets posted right under the bad review.  Personally, I always read the management response and I’ve booked at several places that had multiple bad reviews but there was management responses.  I think it shows you care enough to address the issues!  I think instead of wasting time and money on frivolous law suits about deflamation, the management at these businesses that have bad reviews should concentrate their energy on making improvements and then respond to the bad reviews to say they’ve fixed the problem!  Even if you sue me, what kind of money do you think you’re going to get out of an ordinary civilian???