Covid-19 has affected everybody and every business this year. Here at Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park we, like every other hospitality business, had to make some significant changes to our working practices, to ensure that we provided a ‘safe’ as well as enjoyable holiday experience for all our guests holidaying with us this year.

We have tried our hardest by following the recommended Government guidelines and also the practices recommended to us by the British Holiday & Home Parks Association. These changes have been welcomed by the vast majority of our guests. That said, we recognise that we have been unable to keep all our guests happy and sadly, a few have chosen to leave negative reviews online. These negative reviews can be exceptionally detrimental, they only tell one side of the story and, even though we have an opportunity to reply online, it is often difficult to show the amount of time and effort we have spent beforehand trying to amicably resolve an issue. We have chosen to write this blog post to let our guests see that a bad review may not always be as it seems!  We have included the full correspondence but with the names redacted.

One of our new practices this year was to add two hours additional cleaning time before guest check in. In August 2020, a customer who was due to holiday with us requested compensation for this loss of two hours off their holiday. We tried to resolve this amicably by email. We explained we would not offer compensation for the loss of two hours, given the two hours cleaning was a necessity to keep all of our guests safe during the global pandemic. See email correspondence below…

21st August – Email from customer below

22nd August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park below

23rd August – Email from customer below

24th August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park below

24th August – Email from customer below

24th August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park below

24th August – Email from customer below

25th August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park below

25th August – Email from customer below

25th August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park  below

25th August – Email from same customer but from their work email address below

The customer then contacted some of our followers on Social Media with negative and derogatory comments about us. However, the customer failed to provide a full or correct explanation of events. For those following us who were affected by this we apologise for any upset caused. Below, are an example of some of the comments which this person made on some of our followers’ posts.

27th August – Facebook comments from the same customer

28th August – The below email was then received from the customer asking for us to respond.

28th August – Reply from Mother Ivey’s Bay Holiday Park below

We replied with the following email saying we had nothing further to add. We took the view that the customer had breached good faith by choosing to take their complaint public and in the manner that they had.

Since the above, we are aware that there have been further instances of ‘Trolling’ by the same customer on Facebook and negative reviews have been left on other online Platforms. Below is an example from TripAdvisor followed by our response.We understand local Press have also been contacted by the customer with a request to run a story on this. As far as we are aware, they have chosen not to publish such an article.

All we ask is that when you read a bad review in future, please take a moment to consider that there may be more to it than meets the eye. Often, there are heated emotions involved and a reviewer may well choose to ‘cherry-pick’ facts to give a distorted view.

As a business, we are committed to resolving customer complaints in a fair, professional and private manner. However, we will not tolerate online trolling especially when this affects our other guests and followers.

We will continue to publish blog and social media posts to promote good news stories about the work we and our team do here at Mother Ivey’s Bay, the charities we support and our fantastic guests and local community. We will continue to manage all of our accounts to ensure that this is their sole purpose.