On TripAdvisor, a user going by the handle lovnhawaii left a scathing review headlined, "The hotel staff and hotel is Deceitful."
Already off to a bad start, right? We're just getting warmed up here.
Calling the staff deceitful is a heavy charge and sure to get a rise out of the manager — which it did — but the review doesn't stop there.
Over three breathless paragraphs, lovnhawaii outlined all manner of complaints, focusing on a reception desk employee named Emma.
"Emma at the desk lied to me."
Apparently, Emma said that the hotel only had a double bed left and that there were no other hotels in town. She then found a room with a bathroom for disabled people, a double bed, and a single bed, raised the price, and duped the weary travelers into booking the room.
Oh, it goes on from there. It must have been a horrible, horrible stay.
And it's quite obvious that he's still fuming about the entire experience as he writes this strongly worded review.
At the attached restaurant, the group said they found it staffed by "a bunch of grumpy ole men, overworked and despise one more traveler packing in the joint."
I hate to stereotype here, but is anyone else picturing a bar run by angry old leprechauns?
So much for famous Irish hospitality, apparently — and they found the meal uninspired, too. "Food was OK, I would give it a C+ at best."
Whoa, there, looks like we have a serious food critic in the house.
The list of disappointments just keeps piling up.
The floors and carpets were filthy. And when they drove around, they saw many other places with vacancy. A pretty bad review all around, right? How could anyone defend that?
And their worst transgression on these poor guests? The bad wifi.
"They advertise for free wifi. It is the worst wifi ever!!!"
Nothing ruins a vacation faster than not being able to sit in your hotel room on Netflix the whole time, am I right?
Hotel Doolin's manager, Donal Minihane, must have suffered a few bad reviews in his career. They happen. But taking issue with Emma was a step too far for him.
And so he sharpened his Irish wit and put pen to paper for an epic reply.
"Thank you for staying with us at Hotel Doolin on your recent trip to Ireland and for posting your feedback," he politely began.
Well, at least we can say that the manager is nothing if not open to constructive criticism.
"We were very disappointed with the content of your review. However, after investigating the particulars of your stay in detail with all team members I was even more disappointed to learn that the content of the review was not an accurate reflection of what actually happened."
"From the title of your review, other readers would think that you inadvertently stumbled into Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn and that Hotel Doolin was full of brigands and cutthroats..."
This is about to get real sassy.
"... that our staff wear eye patches and pantaloons and are hiding behind the pillars in the lobby, cutlass clenched between our teeth, waiting to jump out and pillage passerbys."
A picture is worth a thousand words, and these people look like a charming bunch to me!
"You say the hotel is deceitful and dishonest and that one of our staff members, Emma, is a liar when, in fact, it is your good self that is being liberal with the truth."
Did he just call this reviewer a liar? Oh, snap.
"Emma did make a mistake on check-in with the rate, this was spotted the following morning by one of our more senior receptionists and was rectified before you checked out so that you never paid €240 as you stated above."
"Also, the duty manager met you the following morning, apologised for the mistake and gave you a further reduction on your rate."
"We are 100% certain that Emma made a genuine mistake, as sometimes people do, and we feel it is very unfair and irresponsible of you to call her a liar and dishonest on a public forum."
Wait, so lovnhawaii got a discount and an apology, and then decided to write up a cutting review? Nasty.
Donal thinks he knows what was going on, however.
"I'm sensing a lot of anger in the review above and I know that you probably didn't mean to let loose all that anger on us. Hey, sometimes people just need to vent."
"Sometimes at night when I come home from a long day’s work at the hotel, I check to see if everyone is in bed and then I go out into the field at the back of my house and scream into the darkness. I let it all out, like a wolf on a moonlit mountain."
"I feel better after that and nobody gets hurt."
"I'm not saying howling into the night like a wolf will work for you, I don’t know your circumstances, you may have neighbours that’ll think it is weird, but there are other ways of channelling rage that don't have to involve Hotel Doolin and slandering Emma."
"With regards the wifi, yes, the wifi in the west of Ireland is the worst in Europe, there is nothing we can do about this for the moment, although I think we are getting high-speed broadband in the area pretty soon."
"In the meantime, to anybody else reading this review. DO NOT COME TO DOOLIN IF WIFI IS MORE IMPORTANT TO YOU THAN HUMAN INTERACTION, YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED."
"There are three men over the age of forty working in the hotel. Only one of them was working on the night you stayed, so we didn’t know how to deal with the ‘grumpy old men’ in your review, until my assistant manager came up with the only viable solution."
"We’ve decided to execute all three of these men to ensure that no other guests will have to endure the horrific ordeal you went through that evening in the bar."
"Paul, Martin, and Luis will be blindfolded and shot in the back of the head at Fitz’s Cross after mass this Sunday."
If you could collect the sarcasm dripping off this, teenagers would never go hungry.
"I know this will not make up for what happened to you but we hope it will go some way towards showing you that we take your feedback seriously."
"You see, even though you hurt us deeply with your review, we'd still like to be friends, we'd love if you afforded us the opportunity to change your opinion of us and hope that you will return to Doolin someday."
"In fact, each year on the 30th February we have a party for our valued past customers who think we are liars, we all hold hands and dance around a campfire and sing songs that help us forget about the past and look with hope towards the future."
"We'd love if you could make it (that lying cheating ruffian Emma won’t be there, we promise)," he concluded.
People have been loving Donal's defense of Emma and the rest of the Hotel Doolin staff, and they've been sharing their support online.
This woman, in particular, has only compliments for the chef.
And it's entirely possible that, in the end, lovnhawaii's neg-filled review will actually get Hotel Doolin more business, not less.
Talk about turning bad publicity into good publicity, eh? Looks like that bad review really backfired.
Sure, guests can have bad experiences at even the most posh hotels, but it's dirty pool to write up a bad review after management has gone out of their way to make good.
And Hotel Doolin is well loved because they tend to treat their guests well, even with their crappy wifi. Reviews like lovnhawaii's are few and far between for them.
That clapback was too good.
What do you think? Was Donal right to stick up for his staff, or is the customer always right?