When Tony & Jan Jenkinson from Cumbria stayed at Blackpool’s Broadway Hotel in August they were less than impressed. Now you might share my view that if you pay £37 a night for a hotel room you can’t expect an awful lot, but they expected more than they got and so took to Trip Advisor to vent their anger, describing the hotel as a “rotten stinking hovel run by muppets”. What they didn’t expect though was an additional bill for £100.

Hidden away in the hotel terms and conditions was a clause giving them the right to charge £100 for any bad review left on any website. And sure enough, when Mr & Mrs Jenkinson checked their credit card bill they found that they had effectively been fined £100 for leaving the review.

When I first heard about this, my first reaction was probably something like yours – this is disgraceful, you can’t fine people for giving their opinion. But when you look a little deeper into this whole area of online reviews, the rights and wrongs are perhaps less clear cut than they first appear.

Sites like Trip Advisor give power back to the consumer, but you have to wonder whether things might have gone too far, and to a point which defeats the initial purpose. Some hoteliers are reporting that guests who have had a perfectly agreeable stay, now threaten to leave a bad review if they don’t get a discount on their bill. Others report even more brazen would-be guests, who threaten a bad review if they don’t get a discount – even before they’ve booked the room! You don’t have to provide proof you’ve stayed somewhere to leave a review on Trip Advisor remember. Anybody can leave a review, no matter whether they’ve used the hotel or not.

All of this is a big problem for the hotel industry, and it’s a big problem for site users too. If you can’t rely on reviews being genuine, what use is the site? You don’t want to be put off a good hotel any more than you want to end up staying in a poor one. But it seems unlikely that any of this will be resolved until an issue which is characteristic of all sites like this is addressed – user anonymity.

Anonymous people are fearless. They write positive reviews about their own premises, they write negative reviews about their competitors premises, they write vindictive reviews when they don’t get their own way, they accept money for writing reviews both positive and negative, and they write abusive and defamatory reviews if they think they can remain hidden behind a computer keyboard People writing under their own name are far more cautious and circumspect. I doubt that the Jenkinson’s would have written “a rotten stinking hovel run by muppets” had they thought that the comments could be traced back to them.

Few would question the right to free speech, but surely with that right comes responsibility and accountability. In the past, everyone exercising their right to free speech was clearly visible for all to see. They had to stand fair and square behind their words, and that made them stop to think whether what they were saying was fair and accurate, and what impact it would have on others. Anonymous user sites like Trip Advisor remove those checks and balances and are so much less useful as a result.

I don’t expect Trip Advisor or any other review sites to start insisting reviewers use their real names any time soon…the number of reviews would surely plummet…so what do you do about it? Well as a business that’s the subject of online reviews, I’m not really sure, but I heard some good advice for consumers from a guy from ABTA yesterday. He suggested you ignore both the best and worst 10% reviews – which may well have been placed by those with a vested interest – and focus your decision on the middle 80%.

That seems sensible, but I have a piece of advice of my own which is a bit simpler but no less valid – if you book a hotel with 1970’s prices, you can be fairly sure that you will get furnishings, food and service to match.

Oh, and just check the terms and conditions when you book into a hotel!