Apparently recognizing that restaurants and hotels can live and die by their online ratings, the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY included a table-turning clause in their reservation policies: if you book an event at the hotel and a member of your party posts a negative review, the hotel will fine you $500.

As initially reported by Page Six News, the Events and Weddings page on the hotel’s website contained the following language:

If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH, there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any Internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any Internet site, you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review.

It’s unclear when the decidedly anti-customer clause was added to the website (which appears to be as creaky and ancient as the hotel itself apparently is), but the story blew up this morning when Page Six News published a report on the clause. The story was echoed by BGR and Yahoo News before finally landing on the front page of reddit.

The Union Street Guest House quickly backpedaled, posting the following statement on its Facebook page:

The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago. It was meant to be taken down long ago and certainly was never enforced.

No amount of Facebook spin is going to fix the damage, though. Once the news escaped, the Union Street Guest House’s Yelp page quickly became a war zone. While this story was being prepared, the number of reviews jumped from 575 to 757, and the vast majority are most decidedly negative.

"How is that review policy working out for you guys now?" read a typical one-star response.

"LOL," said another. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA­HHAHA."

San Francisco Magazine ran a long-form piece last week on the complex relationship between businesses and Yelp, with San Francisco chef Jeff Mason summarizing the Yelp game like this: "You’re in it whether you want to be or not, and that’s what’s so frustrating." Even a minuscule number of negative reviews can have a disproportionately large detrimental effect on a business’s margins, and it’s easy to see why the Union Street Guest House might want to try to be proactive in preventing negative reviews from happening in the first place.

Unfortunately for the hotel, it's running into a variation on the problems faced by other businesses that try to stifle bad reviews: the harder a business tries to crack down, the angrier the masses get.

In the face of the backlash, the company quickly amended its policy, which as of now reads:

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.

This is an improvement over "don’t give us negative reviews or we’ll fine you," but it remains oddly stilted—there’s still a weird threatening undertone to how the hotel "expect[s] you to explain" the inn’s "vintage" condition to other members of your party.

Calls placed by Ars to the Union Street Guest House’s main phone number went unanswered, though occasionally a fax machine would pick up and beep at us. Things are probably a little busy at their front desk right now.