Sometimes a person’s testimony is required to decide if a customer owes a certain fee. Also, there can be grey area on what the terms and conditions mean.
When you put the two together, you are likely to get an angry customer who wants the world to know how you wronged them. That’s what happened in this story.
Check out what this person, his girlfriend and friends did about it.
Want to charge us extra for something that didn’t happen? Have fun with your reviews tanking.
My girlfriend and I stayed at a rental and one of the company rules was that no extra guests were allowed to stay overnight or there would be a fee.
The company rep claimed that their maintenance guy saw that we had people stay over, so she said we were being charged an extra $200 for breaking “occupancy” rules, even though no one stayed overnight.
So he leapt into action and it was a team effort.
She wouldn’t remove the fee, so my girlfriend and I got about 8 people with 20 different Google accounts all leaving 1 star reviews on the company’s Google page.
This took their rating of around 4.4 all the way down to the mid 3 stars.
Within a couple hours, I got several emails from the original woman and her supervisor.
Then the company got the message and tried to fix it.
They apologized for the “misunderstanding” and asking how they could get us to take down the bad reviews.
We said there was no misunderstanding and refused.
Karen, I hope you understand what occupancy means now, if you still have a job.
Here’s what people are saying.
The prospect of her doing that is funny, but she really needs to clarify what that means in the contract. The burden is on her to prove it, otherwise it doesn’t count legally.
I don’t know, but definitely call them out for false advertising at least. That’s a bigger offence than simply not serving muffins and croissants.
I’m not the biggest fan of bed and breakfasts for this reason. They seem more prone to gatekeeping.
I’m not sure how though, unless they bill in cash.
Great question. A chargeback can also hurt the company’s credit and that can deter them from pulling a stunt like this on other people.
There are much better ways of upselling, folks.
If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.