Reproducing guests' comments

[Coco]

I've just been having a little look at some other members' websites.  I notice Quillan, on yours you have scanned in samples from your guest book.  A very good idea I thought, as although I reproduce quotes from mine there is nothing to say they are not total fabrications - at least, as you say, it would have taken you a long time to reproduce all those different styles of handwriting yourself!  "I'm going to do that" I thought to myself today.  Then I thought, I wonder where you stand legally on this?  Can you just reproduce people's comments in their own hand without their permission?  And aside from the legalities, do you ask each one if it's OK to do so from a personal privacy point of view?

I've made this a posting rather than a PM because I thought it may be of interest to other B&Bers.

[Cerise]

I don't do it 'cos I think it is naff - sorry Quillan.  It would not influence me one way ot the other (well perhaps negatively) if I was choosing somewhere.  As you rightly say Coco anyone - or your auntie - could have written those things.   It is a bit like the 'reviews' on book covers - who cares what the "Piddlehampton Lettuce Growers Club" thought about a mystery novel - or even worse the endorsements for strange products in the back of Sunday papers.  I think if you are going to do it you should probably tell your guests when they write in the book (or mark something to that effect on the cover).   I had to get permission from guests for one advertiser to contact them for references.  Anyway no-one is ever going to put negative comments on their own site are they?

Probably be deluged with B & B ers telling me what good results they have from it, but it still makes me feel uncomfortable.  I feel the same about 'whimsical' advertising too - but everyone assures me that  thatcoy 'imagine yourself curled up in front of our sumptuous fire' stuff, gets results.

 

[Will]

Legally, as long as the person cannot be identified, there is not a problem with reproducing something like that. If they are identifiable, though, you need their consent. It's all connected with data protection, bound up with copyright and (if misused) defamation issues. As always, once lawyers get involved (sorry Llwyncelyn) it gets complex and open-ended.

It raises the interesting question, of course, as to whether a person's handwriting is identifiable. I guess it could be. I think it would be a matter of courtesy to ask anyway.

I tend to agree that the way some people fabricate their own testimonials (to paraphrase the late great Frankie Howerd) merely devalues all of the genuine recommendations. And I dislike the way that even B&Bs seem to have succumbed to advertising and PR speak. I just want to know where they are, what are the facilities, and see decent pictures, not soft-focus whimsy.

[Dick Smith]

I rather like them, though I don't think they would sway my decision they might make me feel good about it. Whenever I have signed a visitors' book I have thought of it as a public statement, so as a user I wouldn't object to it being used.

Best I ever saw, though, was in the Spoons Museum at Brouains, after a somewhat disenchanted school party, "The guide could, at least, have brushed his teeth." Very direct, children.

Perhaps we could have a funny comments thread?

[Miki]

I have to say that I had thought about this a very long time ago and the conclusion was that after asking friends with B&B's, campsites and hotels, that a handful of quotes from guests of various countries and if the guests were French, some of their quotes using their various departments was indeed a good thing. As for how many testimonials, well one has to be sensible, otherwise it is like reading the same page of a book over and over again. Keep them fairly short and sweet, if we (and I suspect many others) were to put them all on our website, I dread to think what some potential guests would think to see pages and pages of quotes, rather too egoistic and sickly for my taste to be honest but then I like websites in general, to be to the point, easy to surf and very easy to contact. Another thing I do not like to see, is patrons directly asking people to write in the book. Place the Livre D'Or where it is easily found and if the guests want to, they will. For some that we know who have enoyed a lovely stay, we will put the book close to where they will pay, a gentle hint in other words !

I know when we look for places to stay, we are quite swayed by the guests remarks, especially hotels where they have marks out of 5 for varying things about the hotel. For instance, if it was said to be 2 out of 5 for cleanliness, well that would be a non goer with Tina for a start !

[Hoddy]

Proprietors certainly need to be selective. The previous entry in the guest book of a holiday cottage I stayed at in Wales said, "A lovely holiday till tragedy struck".

I bet that wasn't put in their advertising.

Hoddy

[Will]

I just had to try a Google, and came across what must be one of the most interminable, self-indulgent and sick-making B&B visitors books yet. I won't link to it, in case it is a forum user, but it shouldn't be difficult for anybody else to find should they want to.

My sense of ironing and surrealism, plus my inbuilt pretentiousness detector, were working overtime when I read things like "Providing a fridge for the guests shows their commitment to making us most comfortable" for the guests, note, not for their food and drink? "Grazie tanto per la vostra bellissima ospitalità speriamo di vederci presto" (from a Canadian) "Most enjoyable one night stay which made our friends’ 50th Wedding celebrations even more special. Wish we had longer to stay and enjoy it more" damned with faint praise? "eternal regrets for not bringing my swimming trunks", "Dave & Heather really do think of everything for the guests’ pleasure. I did enjoy my swim and Trevor and I had a great time in the whirlpool bath" - something going on here perhaps? "Six nights of pampering" so what about the rest of your stay? "Shrewsbury’s “shop mobility” worked well" (no comment) "where else do you get greeted by fresh roses in your room?" - those talking flowers can be a pain "the best lemon curd in the world" - aah, a real highlight. "Returning – for the first time in mid-summer – we were able to find xxx without maps or any difficulty" so what happened the first time? "nothing has been too much trouble. I look forward to my return here, with my husband next time" then "Hope Dave enjoyed his night with 7 women!" no comment again.

More damming with faint praise - "The breakfasts are as good as on the Saga Rose cruise ship!! ".

And I only went about a quarter of the way through. The web page was over 5000 words long ... And that was only one of six pages of guest comments on the web site.

[nimportequoi]

I have a 'livre d'or' on my site and people who have stayed have said that they were impressed with the comments and it helped them make their decision to book with us, so I don't think they are a waste of time. I haven't made any up (honest guv!), they are all copied from the books left in the gites, although there is no way to verify this on a website. I do ask permission from guests before putting them on the site.

I find the French like writing in guest books a lot more than the British guests do!

[zeb]

I don't think I've ever read comments by guests on a website - as someone else said, they will have been carefully picked from the guestbook and are bound to be 100%positive and gushing!

It's the location, property description, photos and what's included in the price which concern me. I'm very careful after a disaster in the early ninties when we found we had booked a gite in the Auvergne for a fortnight which had no bathroom (it did have an al fresco shower suspended from a tree), and a chemical loo which we had to empty before use!!! Yes, we did leave a few pages of suggestions!

A little off topic, I know, but do any of you worry if your guests don't leave a message in the guestbook?

Some friends have a gite and they are always concerned if there isn't a message left at the end of a stay - they chew over all the possible reasons why for days!

[Coco]

[quote user="zeb"] A little off topic, I know, but do any of you worry if your guests don't leave a message in the guestbook? Some friends have a gite and they are always concerned if there isn't a message left at the end of a stay - they chew over all the possible reasons why for days![/quote]

I'm like Miki, I just leave the guestbook on the side so that they can write in it if they like.  Of course, I have occasionally wondered if people have chosen not to because they haven't been happy but generally I put it down to the fact that they can't think of anything different to say than is already there, they haven't even noticed it, or of course, we have had one or two (usually in two's [;-)]) of people who wouldn't want it known that they had stayed here at all .... they're usually from Paris, here for one night and don't want to bother with breakfast, prefering to get up later!!! [Www]

The best internet "guestbook" of all of course are the independent traveller sites where people can put their own views, good or bad, after they have returned home and can also remain anonymous.  Even those aren't failproof though.  We have some excellent reviews on one such site and over the last 12 months I have had as much business via that site as from many of the paying sites I advertise on.  However, I still get comments from people saying that they take the comments with a pinch of salt as I could be getting friends to write the reviews.  There again, why did they book with us having read the reviews if they're not going to believe them?[8-)]

[nimportequoi]

[quote user="Coco"]The best internet "guestbook" of all of course are the independent traveller sites where people can put their own views, good or bad, after they have returned home and can also remain anonymous.  Even those aren't failproof though.  We have some excellent reviews on one such site and over the last 12 months I have had as much business via that site as from many of the paying sites I advertise on. [/quote]

Coco, which one do you use for your reviews?

Some people just don't like writing in guest books, my other half for example. It doesn't necessarily follow that they have had a bad holiday, they just don't want to be obliged to leave comments. I have a few examples of people who didn't write any comments but have re-booked, so they can't have found the experience of staying with us that bad!

[Cassis]

Trip Advisor is fairly popular site for people to put comments on places they have stayed.  We've had results off there.  But like a personal site, it's still open to abuse by the owner either posing or getting people to put things on for them.  Some places get a bunch of quotes that appear in a flurry then nothing - or a small but steady stream over winter and nothing in summer.  How weird is that?  I'm a suspicious cynical sausage, though!

We leave the guest book on the landing with a pen.  It's nice when people fill something in but it doesn't make or break my day unless we've really put ourselves out for an awkward customer who then doesn't leave a note of appreciation!

I reproduce some on our site's index page (French for the French, English for the English version) for two main reasons:

1. It is packed with keywords which help search results.
2. The main page is designed for browsers 800px wide - the guest book down the right fills up the blank space for people with higher definition screens.  About 11% of our visitors use a 800x600px browser and a lot of web designers still advise using that width so that people do not have to scroll sideways to read your page.  The alternative would be to centre the page on screen but I thought this was a more useful way of filling the space.

I don't use images of the guest book pages because about 10% of our visitors are on dial-up and I don't want to make page loading any slower than it needs to be.

[Coco]

Yes it's Tripadvisor that we are on.  It has brought us loads of business and one lady was even prepared to put her email address on there so that people could contact her for more information about our place.  The people that stayed last weekend were examples of those that found us via Tripadvisor but at the same time said they are really cynical about how genuine the comments are.

[Wozza]

[quote user="Will "]

"Dave & Heather really do think of everything for the guests’ pleasure. I did enjoy my swim and Trevor and I had a great time in the whirlpool bath" - something going on here perhaps?

[/quote]

Reproducing guests comments? As opposed to reproducing guests' comments?

[Cassis]

I am intrigued by something I have seen on someone's website.  If you publish your guests' email addresses on your website, even in a dynamic page using a server-side scripting language like php, can spammers harvest their addresses, or not?  E.g.:

http://bb.lowernormandy.com/

Is this safe?  I guess the guests gave permission, but even so ... [blink] ... what do you reckon?

[Owens88]

Publishing a guest's e-mail address on a web-site ?

-Words fail me.

 

 

[Cassis]

Well - I that's what I thought. [8-)]

[Quillan]

The reasons why we put scanned images of our guests comments on our website is because we always get people to write in their native language and people from the same country like to see what others thought of our place. Another reason is that many try to ‘sell’ their B&B and my belief is why not let somebody else do it for you and a guests book is ideal. After all you can take as many pictures of your B&B as you like and run them through Photoshop. Likewise you can say what you like and some I have seen do. Our attitude is read what others say and our photo's are exactly as our rooms are if not we will give you your money back. Does it work? Absolutely, we opened on the 1st of Feb and our first guest arrived on the 3rd.

Our stats from last year showed that 76% of our guests came through our own website. We have had loads and loads of comments about our website, all positive, and one of the things they like is the ability to read the guests comments. If it works then quite frankly I don’t care. It’s all about people in beds.

 

[Will]

It looks as if that particular site that Cassis linked to was a forum-style guest book where guests could put their own comments straight to the site, rather than being taken from comments written in a vistors book and subsequently reproduced. So presumably they know that their e-mail addresses would appear (and as there are some that don't have addresses shown there is, presumably, an option, not to show this). Even so, publicising your e-mail address like that is not advisable, it's just asking for spam, or worse.

One of the strangest online guest books I have seen (not B&B) is on author George East's site. George freely admits that he has forgotten the admin password so cannot delete any of the weirdo messages. It shows what can happen when the spammers find a site like that.

[Cassis]

 [:D] Very good, Will!  What a remarkable "guest book"!  George East Website Guest Book

[pauloffrance]

Hi

I'm Paul and http://bb.lowernormandy.com is mine.

The guest book is filled out online if our guests feel the need to leave a comment. There is no way we would transfer comments from our guest book to the online version. The guest book we use encodes the email addresses left by our guests so as to make them unreadable by harvesters. Also on top of this I use .htaccess methods to prevent direct access to the original information. We do take our guests security very seriously.

If anyone is interested in protecting their published email addresses within their own sites go take a look at this page http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php and try using the javascript version.

Good luck all, and for those with B&B's I wish you a good season.

[Cassis]

The method suggested in the link for hiding email addresses is not foolproof against all mail harvesters (the encoded character strings can still be read and translated), though it is hell of a lot better than nothing. It's not entirely dissimilar to this one which was suggested previously:

http://www.hide-email-script.com/

There's a whole bunch of ways of trying to hide email addresses - the most often recommended is to use forms to manage email responses from your website.  There's a lot of information on various methods of hiding email addresses on the Net.  Here's a site I suggested some time ago which summarises the methods,  for anyone who's interested and did not see it first time:

http://www.csarven.ca/hiding-email-addresses

[pauloffrance]

Yes I agree nothing is airtight. I think that most bots do not read JavaScript so encasing an email address inside a script will help a great deal.

Some people do not like to use forms so for this reason we put our email address out there. Unfortunately email addresses and the like do get exchanged on open forums etc, and so I just admit defeat and live with the spam. We get most of our business by way of the internet so I am prepared to live with the consequences.

We are moving our hosting to a new server and during this I will be removing the email addresses on our guestbook for an altogether different reason. We have had a few cases where potential guests have emailed old guests and asked questions like "how nice are the people who run the B&B?" and "was the food any good?" and that was just the ones we heard about. Strange really, everyone knows the food is great and that we are the nicest people on the planet (just kidding!).

If there is one thing that I have learnt during all my years of being involved in computers, is that no matter how clever you think you are, there is always someone just that little bit sharper that will take you down. Some very large companies have spent gazillions on protecting their software etc, only to find it cracked within hours of launching.

So, as much as we protect our email addresses, it only takes one bot somewhere to find it and then it's all over, prepare for the spam! Believe me, someone will post it somewhere or have their address book attacked by a virus, so I may as well make good use of it. Eventually tougher laws will be brought to fight this problem, but that is an altogether different topic.....

Nice to talk with you.

[Jo Taylor]

I had to edit our visitors' book.
One lady wrote "Nice weather, depressing area.".
Well, no, madam, it's not, unless you come on holiday with a husband and son who spend the whole time dragging you off to D-Day sites and cemeteries when you'd rather be on the beach! The note I added was, of course, a little more diplomatic.

I think a few comments on a web site are OK, especially if they relate to attractions in the area; there's no point reproducing yards of "Nice weather lovely area nice gite" ones.

Jo

[Cassis]

[quote user="Jo Taylor"]

I had to edit our visitors' book.

One lady wrote "Nice weather, depressing area.".

Well, no, madam, it's not, unless you come on holiday with a husband and son who spend the whole time dragging you off to D-Day sites and cemeteries when you'd rather be on the beach! The note I added was, of course, a little more diplomatic.[/quote]

So what did you do - cross out "area" and insert "company"?[:)]