Grimmwelt in Kassel is taking action against online reviews

Hotel or restaurant visits are sometimes based on online reviews. Therefore, companies often take action against negative reviews. Now also Grimmwelt in Castle.

Kassel – Online reviews are now very important for businesses. If a restaurant only has two stars on Google or has many negative reviews, you can decide not to accept it. Therefore, companies try to delete negative reviews. This is especially successful if evaluators cannot prove that they were actually there. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) also decided accordingly in the hotel review case. Below is a description of the problem using a case from the city of Kassel.

A lawyer from Frankfurt evaluates Grimmwelt in Kassel – the company demands deletion

Ulrich Warnke visited Grimmwelt a good year ago. Lawyer from Frankfurt He and his wife were looking forward to visiting the Castle Fairy Tale Museum. “We knew the old Grimm Museum, and we had high expectations,” Warneke says. In the end, the couple didn’t really like the world of Grimm. But this, as Warnke describes it, is just his personal impression. He also reproduced this in a review on Google. However, the company has now asked Warncke to delete his review.

“The museum is small, dark, confusing and full of texts. Anyone under 1.80 meters tall can’t read some of the signs. The best thing is the cafeteria which has a very nice view,” Warneke wrote online shortly after his visit. The lawyer admits that he likes to use concise, but not subjective, wording. “If my experience is average, I don’t write anything,” Warneke says. “But if I like something very much or not at all, I write about it.” He also likes to get honest feedback from others, just so he can save himself a visit to a museum or restaurant. .

It seems that Grimault saw a violation of personal rights

Warnke was even more surprised when he recently received an email from Google notifying him of a complaint about his review. The complainant states that he believes that his personal rights have been violated, and calls on Warnke to declare within seven days that this is not the case. The complainant is the company being assessed, in Warnke’s case it is Kasseler Grimmwelt. It says the rating cannot be set. Reference is made to the BGH judgment on hotel valuations (BGH of 9 August 2022 – VI ZR 1244/20).

The ruling relates to the fact that the reviewers may not have been guests of the hotel in question and therefore must prove this later for the review submitted. If the seven-day deadline is not met, the review will be removed. In Ulrich Warnke’s view, the aforementioned ruling of the Federal Court of Justice is irrelevant. He also mentions this in his answer on Google. On the one hand, Grimmwelt is a non-profit limited liability company and therefore does not have any public person rights.

Case from Grimmwelt in Kassel: The hotel ruling on reviews can only be applied to museums to a limited extent

Warnke said the BGH case involved a hotel where employee data was typically recorded. In the case of Grimm World it is a museum. When you visit there, you rarely leave your name and address.

Ulrich Warnke once again points out that his review should not be deleted. After a short time, he received an answer from Google that the report of his experiment had been received and would be sent to the complainant, namely Grimmwelt, for his information. If the complainant does not respond, Google will not pursue the matter further.