bad faith

On the Road: Hotel Industry Deals With Its Online Critics

Now there are scores of major online travel and social media sites sprouting hundreds of thousands of customer reviews. And the hotel industry is frantically trying to stay on top of the commotion.

What appeared to be one such effort by a hotel executive drew attention last week. Tnooz.com, a site that specializes in travel technology, reported that an executive based in Sydney, Australia, with the worldwide hotel chain Accor, had anonymously posted more than 100 reviews on TripAdvisor.com, the consumer travel site that features millions of customer reviews of travel services, including hotels around the world.

The reviews of various Accor hotels were positive. A few took shots at competing hotels. Tnooz said that the executive, Peter Hook, admitted posting the reviews in a statement in which he explained that most of his reviews were for tourism activities and restaurants rather than just hotels. I could not reach Mr. Hook for comment.

Accor hotels around the world include the brands Sofitel, Novotel, Pullman, Mercure and Ibis. Kerrie Hannaford, an Accor spokeswoman, told me Friday she was unaware of the controversy involving the anonymous reviews. She did not respond to further calls for comment.

Knowing how busy most hotel managers are, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the pressures they have come under in recent years because of the tsunami of online reviews. Many hotel companies expect managers to respond personally to negative reviews, a time-consuming chore.

Olery, a company that offers brand reputation management for hotels, said in a report that about 78 percent of travelers used online reviews to help decide which hotel to book.

As the importance of online customer evaluations grows, an increasing number of hotel reviews are suspect. Big travel review sites like TripAdvisor say they try to monitor reviews to weed out the ones from customers clearly acting in bad faith, or from competitors simply out to torpedo a rival.

One global hotel company, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, not long ago created its own review system open to members of its loyalty program, called The Club. It allows review privileges only to members who have had more than one stay at a given hotel. Still, the reviews are open to honest evaluation, including criticism, said Paul Kerr, chief executive of Small Luxury Hotels, which represents more than 520 boutique luxury hotels in about 70 countries around the world.

Members overwhelmingly say that reviews are an important consideration in booking a hotel, he said. But for his group’s hotels, which do about 25 percent of their trade in business travel, it is important to cull the rampaging herd, he added.

“I didn’t believe that TripAdvisor provides a necessarily very good indicator of quality for high-end hotels because some of the people writing reviews may have only been to a luxury hotel once or twice, and don’t really know what they are talking about,” he said.

That can cut both ways, because an uninformed rave has minimal value to a discerning customer. “Someone might say, ‘Oooh, it’s so great; they have these fluffy towels’ — but that’s the sort of thing you expect in a luxury hotel,” he said. “On the other hand, you can get some unfair and unfounded criticism from people who don’t understand what a luxury hotel is about.”

He added: “We have about 450 reviews at about 250 of our hotels now. The customers love it. The hotels don’t. Some hotels don’t understand that it’s so important to have these reviews because it increases your rankings in Google. Your search-engine utilization is much better when it’s honest and transparent.”

I compared online reviews, chosen at random from the TripAdvisor and Small Luxury Hotels Web sites, for two of the group’s high-end hotels, the Huntington in San Francisco and Le Pavillon de la Reine in Paris.

Both hotels got mostly rave reviews, many using the word “superb.” The few criticisms were similar, but different in tone.

A review of the Huntington on the group’s Web site said, “I didn’t enjoy that Wi-Fi was charged … really? Also, I thought the room could have used fresh paint, and the furniture looked a bit tired.” On TripAdvisor, an otherwise favorable review of Pavillon said, “Our room was in need of a thorough update.” It added, “The bathroom makeup mirror was held to the stem by duct tape.”

Mr. Kerr said that there was genuine value in providing reliable reviews, including those with criticism, for discerning and knowledgeable customers — even on a Web site managed by an organization that represents hotels, not the general public. “Our customers are not stupid people at all. They know what it’s all about,” he said.

On the other hand, he added, there is a desire for perspective. “If a hotel has only one review and it’s not a great one, that’s really not fair to that hotel,” he said. “So to make sure there are balanced reviews, we’ve got to have at least five reviews of a hotel before we put it all up on the system.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/hotel-industry-deals-with-its-online-critics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Labor Board Accuses Cablevision of Bad-Faith Bargaining

John J. Walsh, the acting director of the labor board’s regional office in Brooklyn, said in an interview on Thursday that his office would issue a complaint against Cablevision, saying the company “has bargained with no intent to reach an agreement” — in what several workers said was a strategy to undermine support for their union, the Communications Workers of America.

The fight has been particularly vitriolic and visible, not least because the family that controls Cablevision, the Dolans, also controls the Knicks and Rangers.

This week, the labor board’s Brooklyn office is accusing Cablevision of engaging in bad-faith bargaining by failing to provide union negotiators with needed information, by retracting previously agreed-upon proposals and by refusing to meet on a regular basis. Cablevision, Mr. Walsh said, has also insisted on “proposals that no — quote unquote — self-respecting union could accept, such as the unfettered right to subcontract work.”

The two sides have not settled on a contract since the Brooklyn employees voted 180 to 86 to unionize 15 months ago, motivated in part because Verizon’s unionized cable installers were earning about one-third more than they did. The vote made them the only group among Cablevision’s 17,000 employees to unionize.

Cablevision disputed the board’s claims. Charles R. Schueler, a company spokesman, called the accusation of bad-faith bargaining “absurd on its face.”

“We have a complete package of contract proposals on the table in front of the communications workers, and we are awaiting a response,” he added.

Mr. Schueler said the board was “factually inaccurate” in asserting that Cablevision had retracted proposals or avoided talking. “The company has participated in 25 negotiating sessions with the union, with 4 more scheduled,” he said.

On Monday, the labor board’s regional office for Manhattan and the Bronx said it would issue a complaint accusing Mr. Dolan of illegally telling Cablevision workers in the Bronx that they would be excluded from training and job opportunities if they voted to unionize. That office also said Cablevision had illegally offered better pay and benefits to workers in the Bronx and elsewhere to discourage them from unionizing. The Bronx workers voted 121 to 43 against unionizing last June.

Neither complaint constitutes a finding of wrongdoing. The cases are likely to be heard by an administrative law judge.

On Monday, Cablevision said in a statement that the board’s allegations were inaccurate and that the communications workers’ assertions were “part of their ongoing campaign to damage Cablevision’s reputation.”

Mr. Walsh said his office had told Cablevision that it could head off a formal complaint by reaching a settlement with the labor board and the union.

He said the Brooklyn complaint would also accuse Cablevision of acting illegally by permanently replacing 22 workers in January when they were seeking to meet with a company official to discuss the stalled negotiations. The company reinstated them over the last two months — after the union had complained to the labor board that they had been fired illegally — and the board is seeking back pay for them.

Mr. Schueler said that with those employees back at work, “we consider the matter largely behind us.”

Frustrated that the union has failed to reach a contract, dozens of Cablevision workers in Brooklyn have petitioned the labor board to hold a vote to determine whether the workers favor getting rid of the union.

Because of the board’s complaint against Cablevision, it will dismiss the petition, Mr. Walsh said. “We have evidence that there is a causal nexus between the employer’s unfair labor practices in the failure to bargain in good faith and the employees’ disaffection from the union and the employees’ coming to us wanting to have a decertification election,” he said.

But Mr. Schueler said, “It would be outrageous if this election were not allowed to proceed and our employees’ voices were not allowed to be heard.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/nyregion/cablevision-attacked-again-by-nlrb-in-new-york.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

On the Road: Hotel Industry Deals With Its Online Critics

Labor Board Accuses Cablevision of Bad-Faith Bargaining

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