Earlier today, we told you about the Texas hotel that offered guests up to $5 if they posted positive reviews on any number of popular travel sites. A rep for the hotel has since responded to say that this was a case of an overzealous employee acting on their own.

In an e-mail to Consumerist, a rep for the Grand Hotel Dallas writes:

[T]hank you for bringing this directly to my attention. As soon as I saw your email I did a little digging to find out about more about the sign and how it got posted at our hotel unbeknownst to me. What I found out was that this sign was posted by one of our front desk staff members while I was out of town for a few days. The team member was trying to go above and and beyond based on a staff meeting we had a couple of weeks ago where I asked the team to try and come up with some creative ways to encourage and get more user reviews for the hotel. By creative ways I wasn’t thinking this but that’s something I will speak with the team about.

Offering any type of incentive for reviews is not acceptable or right in any form or fashion. We do not condone or approve of this in any way. We have several new team members so we’ll complete this internal investigation and provide additional training measures and process changes to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again in the future. In finding out what happened I learned that the sign had been up a little over a week or so and is now in the shredder.

As we mentioned in the original post, Consumerist reader Jim, a guest at the hotel, confirmed this morning that the sign had been taken down at some point last night.

The rep for the hotel says his team will contact the websites listed on the poster — including TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Priceline, Expedia, and Hotels.com — “to inform them of what occurred and to ask that they remove any reviews posted in the last last two weeks just to be safe.”

The rep, whose family recently purchased the hotel, concludes his e-mail:

Once again, our apologizes for any issues this may have caused with any current or past guests who informed you of this. We do have a 100% satisfaction guarantee policy and we would be happy to make amends with anyone who was impacted by this. As I said we will rectify this with the online companies immediately and I truly appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

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