Recently, one of our local business owners and a fitness center member at the Meadowmere saw a piece on ABC News about online hotel and restaurant reviews.  Southern Maine was in the spotlight, but for all the wrong reasons. It seems that a local hotel owner in Wells, Maine (just to the north of Ogunquit) had become a focal point of the news story – a story about how some hotel owners will post mock good reviews for their hotel and may even go as far as to post false negative reviews about competitors. The nature of the Internet makes such behavior possible and in the end, probably not all that surprising. It is however, disappointing to see it close to home.

So in that light, we thought is was important to share where our online reviews have come from. With reviews on almost every travel site – from TripAdvisor to IgoUgo to Yelp – we have had our fair share of good, bad and inaccurate reviews. When they are bad, we write an Owner/Management Response – it is the fair and responsible means to answer the customer. Occasionally, the customer has not presented the entire story. Occasionally, despite our best efforts, we have not been able to meet a guest’s expectations. Rarely, an inaccurate review appears – such as for another hotel – and we work with the site to fix this. Last, but by no means least, the majority of reviews have been good. We have been a family run hotel for 25 years and have wonderful people who visit us. We genuinely appreciate them sharing their experience.

However, no matter the guest or circumstances, there are no discounts or deals for online reviews. We also do not review other hotels in the area – Ogunquit is a community with excellent business people who work very hard and are our neighbors and friends. It simply is not an option and would be unethical. For guests who say ‘well then I will go on the internet and write about this’ in hopes that a complimentary stay or large discount will be offer – we do not base our decisions on such factors. In fact, should a guest feel strongly enough that their experience should be shared on the internet, it would be inappropriate for us to ‘bribe’ a guest away from writing a review (just as it would be inappropriate to bribe a guest into writing a review!).

In a final note, we update our website daily and work hard to make meadowmere.com an accurate display of our Ogunquit Resort. We encourage you to call us and ask about what is most important to your trip. After all, your stay with us should be a vacation.