By Slipping Non-Disparagement Clauses Into Contracts with Renters, Real Estate Firms Seek to Silence Criticism

Tomorrow afternoon, my daughter Pauline and I will be conducting a recorded interview with our travel-writing colleague, Christopher Elliott, about a story he recently wrote for the Washington Post about the non-disparagement clauses that are increasingly cropping up in the contracts that travelers sign when they rent a vacation home. That interview will undoubtedly run in this coming Sunday's broadcast of The Travel Show ( www.wor710.com/arthur-frommer ).
 
It's an important -- not to say a chilling -- issue that deserves a great deal of attention. Apparently, the real estate firms that rent vacation homes are including contract clauses that prohibit the renter from posting critical remarks about the rental on the various user-generated websites. In the case cited by Elliott, a couple rented a home in Arizona through VRBO.com, but the contract they signed was with a local real estate firm. Dissatisfied with the rental, the couple posted a negative review on the website operated by VRBO.com, only to be told that if the review were not withdrawn, their credit card would be charged for $500. Why? Because they had violated a non-disparagement clause in the rental contract with the local real estate firm.
 
Think about that for a moment. Because the property -- or theoretically, the hotel or resort -- where you rent accommodations has your credit card, they can enforce these non-disparagement clauses by simply hitting you with a penalty. Doing the same, hotels in the future could hand you a small-type contract containing a clause that you will not later criticize that property on a review submitted, let's say, to TripAdvisor; and if you did, you would be charged a penalty of $500. Unless you signed the contract, you would not be permitted to rent a room at the hotel. (You can almost hear the hotel industry collectively exulting over this method of wiping out the effectiveness of user-generated reviews.)
 
Now the various people who defend these clauses, base their arguments on all sorts of horrid, potential and hypothetical threats. They claim there are a lot of people who, upon checking out, threaten the rental property with a negative review unless they are given a retroactive discount on the rental. They claim, in effect, that vacation renters are blackmailing them.
 
In my view, simply to state that argument is to refute it. You could justify a great many denials of our First Amendment rights of free speech with scary hypotheticals like that.
 
I regard this issue as an important one, and fear that a great many hotels and real estate companies may soon adopt this method of shutting off negative reviews. Have any of our readers encountered such "non-disparagement" clauses? I'd be interested in hearing of your own experiences or reactions. And in the meantime, you might like to tune in to The Travel Show this coming Sunday to hear a further discussion of the topic.