Camelot Castle Hotel’s use as a Scientology recruitment and training center sparks growing online reputation crisis

Jun 13th 2010

Before today, I didn’t know Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall existed. It probably would have stayed that way had not a family member and their partner returned from a stay there, full of horror stories about the place.

These weren’t your run-of-the-mill ‘what a dreadful dump’ kind of comments. Oh, no. These were of the ‘this place literally scared the shit out of us’ kind. Say what?? That’s quite a reaction. You’ve got my full attention now.

A quick visit to TripAdvisor (have your pinch of salt ready) reveals 182 ‘excellent’ reviews and 124 ‘terrible’ reviews.  Such extreme polarisation of opinion is unusual and a good sign that something odd is going on and the problem is that Joe Public suddenly wants to know “what?”.

Read the reviews yourself and make up your own mind which are credible and which are not.  Would you stay there?

The negative reviews are extraordinarily critical of the owners and of a peculiar – and less than transparent – agenda. You would be forgiven for thinking that the hotel’s purpose might be to ensure your satisfaction as a paying customer. It isn’t – as this page quickly demonstrates. It seems they’re out to make a better world through art and creativity. According to this press release, if you’re an artist (or just think you are) then you’re welcome to stay at the hotel as long as you like for free.

By the time you’ve read the hotel’s own disconcerting copy on its website and the TripAdvisor and Holiday Watchdog reviews it’s hard not to start to feel uneasy about the connection between the owners of this hotel and the ‘Church of Scientology’.

A quick standard Google search for “Camelot Castle Hotel” reveals (as you’d expect) a P1 of Google stuffed full of neutral references (apart from this lone article now). These include the hotel’s own website plus a range of other tourism directory listings. Nothing unusual there.  In fact, almost nothing on the first 5 or 6 pages cause concern. Except this one listing on P2 beginning: “It takes a lot to freak me…” [update: this has since changed considerably]

But search for “Camelot Castle Hotel scientology” or “camelot castle scientology” and things will get much more interesting. Very quickly, you’ll find yourself encountering owner John Mappin, his Khazakh wife Irina and artist Ted Stourton. A little more research on all three gets even more interesting – not least Mappin’s short career as ‘porn film’ actor and his defeat in the High Court in a sordid fraud case.  But these things are really only the beginning.

What does this odd threesome have to do with scientology?  [They have since gone public about their 20+ years as dedicated Scientologists]. I recommend you read some of the comments and check out some of the links on this site here and this site here and read this press release before you make up your own mind.  Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself looking at a ‘religion’ that appears to have more bad things said about it than good things than any other you can think of.

Having read all this, you hope that these reviews and commentators are joking. I mean, c’mon – a cult centre masquerading as a hotel in the heart of sleepy Cornwall? Puh-lease. That’s what I thought when my family members texted me from inside their locked hotel room. But what they told me is confirmed by the all the research I’ve done since.

If you’re still not decided, then you could read Camelot Castle’s creepy ‘Westminster Independent’ newspaper, published by John Mappin who has declared that he will never again publish anything but positive news – particularly pseudo-news like articles such as ‘The Truth About Drugs’ which quickly leads you first to the ‘Foundation for a drug free world‘, and from there to Narconon -  a Scientology front organisation.

If you get as far as the serious allegations that staff are forced to study Scientology materials disguised as ‘business training’ (get your Google translator out) then you’d be forgiven for being worried.

Mappin and Stourton are fully-documented, fee-paying Scientologists, there’s no doubt about that but the fact that they have been less than upfront about their agenda no doubt fuels many of the harshest online hotel reviews.

I don’t know about you but the one thing I want from a hotel is that it’s clean, in every sense of the word – above and below the surface.  And that it exists first and foremost to accommodate me and satisfy my needs. What I wouldn’t want is dingy rooms, mouldy walls, Port-a-loo sanitation, hard sells of bad paintings, connections with Scientology or creepy personalities with sleazy pasts. But hey, that’s just me.

The moral of the story? It’s one that so many businesses get wrong. Hotel guests (like any business’s customers) expect you to serve them, not your own pet ideologies. Mix those two up and they won’t just feel dissatisfied, they’ll feel swindled.

When all’s said and done, an online reputation rabbit hole as deep and as bad as this one is the product of some very poor decisions. No matter how unpleasant it is to accept, the fact is that you simply can’t blame everyone else for the disconcerting impression that you’ve created through your own actions.

Update: 08/07/10 – today I got a threatening phone call from someone claiming to be a Church of Scientology minister in the USA (he withheld his number of course).

He demanded to know what I had against John Mappin and Scientology.

From the outset, he did that Scientology ‘handling‘ thing I’ve since learned about. According to L. Ron Hubbard, anyone who disagreed with Scientology is a criminal.  They’re trained to assault you with accusations about you, your past, your CRIMES rather than answer the question you asked them or address the issue you raised about their ‘church’.

Watch this very revealing video of scientologists ‘handling’ a critic and you’ll get a very good idea of the experience.

A couple of minutes into the call, I couldn’t resist saying to him “I’m sorry, Minister Jeffries, that is by far the worst fake American accent I’ve ever heard.  Now if you’ll do me the honour of dropping it, perhaps we can talk?”  He took great offense – but amusingly (and entirely unsurprisingly) by the end of the call, he had just about forgotten he was supposed to be doing it.

Sadly, he didn’t answer my question: are anonymous and threatening calls to anyone who disagrees with you  a central tenet of Scientology? When you’ve done a little research, you’ll find the answer to that question is a resounding ‘yes’.  Anyone who disagrees with them is branded as a member of a ‘hate group’ and targeted for legal, professional and personal attack.

Take the recent attacks on Welsh councillor John Dixon for example. Or, if you want something a little more sinister – how about the story of how Scientology bankrupted then took over the Cult Awareness Network, so that today, worried parents looking for advice on how to get their kids out of dangerous cults get advised by… yes, you’ve got it – Scientologists.

Those are examples of what L.Ron called his ‘Fair Game’ policy which states that any critic of Scientology should be destroyed by any and all methods available – legal or otherwise.

It’s now been a couple of months since I posted about this hotel and in that time, I’ve observed the reputation crisis around this hotel growing deeper by them moment.  There is now a 45+ page long thread on the WhyWeProtest forum which has exposed fully the extend of these peoples’ activities and their plans for Scientology in this region.  It goes beyond the quirky and into the downright sinister.

There is also another site about Camelot Castle Hotel and Scientology that has appeared in the last few months. The people behind that site (like those in the WhyWeProtest forum) believe that this hotel is fast becoming a problem for TripAdvisor because they believe it is faking its own positive reviews.  It seems that TripAdvisor has now become aware of this problem and taken steps to remove a small number of suspect reviews but it will be interesting to watch to see what develops.

My original post was a response to the personal experience of a family member who stayed at the hotel and was – to put it frankly – freaked out by the state of the accommodation and the owners.  I did some research in Google and was amazed at what I found – a very interesting situation from an online reputation management point of view. What I’ve discovered since is that Scientology is its own very worst enemy from a PR perspective.  You’d be hard-pushed to think of how to do it worse – which is the gist of the post (below).

Scientologists seem to believe that everybody else has got it wrong and that people should go to the Scientology website to find out about the church and its founder.  That’s a bit like a hotel saying ‘don’t read the 1 star reviews on TripAdvisor, go to our website to find out what it’s really like here’. That approach, in today’s context, it’s practically deluded. Whether you like it or not, people take more notice of what other people are saying about you than they do of your propaganda.

Unlike the person who called to ‘handle’ me, I’m a believer in free speech. ‘Minister Jeffries’ you are welcome to comment here using your real, verifiable name [I'm still waiting].

By the way, for your information, I did report your call and threat to the police.