A British man who posted a negative review about a Qatar hotel after his wife's unsettling experience there later found himself locked up for four nights under the country's defamation laws.
Craig Barratt, 49, and his wife Sarah, 34, from York, stayed at the Doha Ritz-Carlton in summer 2024 while he was contracted in the Middle East in his role as an international healthcare consultant.
The luxury hotel is part of the US-owned Marriott hotel group but has recently become notorious as the venue for meetings between officials of Hamas and the Iranian government.
After an unsettling experience with two men by the poolside and an alleged cover-up by the hotel, Mr Barratt wrote a scathing review on TripAdvisor.
Almost a year later, when the couple returned to the country in June 2025, Mr Barratt found himself stopped at the airport and discovered he’d been convicted of a cyber crime in his absence.
Months later, when he attempted to appeal the conviction, he found himself hauled into a detention centre for four nights, The Telegraph reports.
Radha Stirling, of organisation Detained in Doha, says she deals with around 100 cybercrime cases a year. She said: “The issue is not just the law itself, but the fact that the legal process doesn’t require any evidentiary burden.
“The prosecution will automatically take any complaint all the way, which can result in up to two years in prison.”
Mr Barratt’s wife Sarah claimed she was approached at the poolside on July 30, 2024, by two local men dressed "strangely" in matching swimming shorts, one of whom pestered her for her phone number and hotel room.
Aware of the country's patriarchal values, Mrs Barratt says she tried to laugh off the man's advances until he insisted he would come to her room with her. He allegedly told her: “I will sleep with you, you will enjoy it, and you will fall in love with me.”
Mrs Barratt says she was frightened by the incident and later called her husband, who was posted in Saudi Arabia, in a state of distress.
Three days later, Mr and Mrs Barratt say they were in the hotel lobby when they spotted the same two men again, dressed strangely in matching polo shirts and shorts.
"I thought, ‘Surely not. There’s no way,’” said Mrs Barratt, before a confrontation was said to have broken out in the lobby.
Mr Barratt turned to TripAdvisor to write a scathing review.
Under the headline “Unsafe for women”, he wrote: “Not safe for western women. Local predators are allowed to harass guests with impunity. Security staff are instructed not to intervene and the hotel management conspire with police to allow men to treat women as they wish. Such a horrible and terrifying shame for an otherwise great hotel.”
The couple then packed their bags at 4am and left for another hotel. Meanwhile, the review appeared on TripAdvisor for just three nights before it was hastily taken down by the platform.
As the couple headed back to the UK, they were unaware a defamation case was being brought against Mr Barratt. It was one which would see him tried and convicted in his absence with a fine of 20,000 Qatari riyals (about £4,000) and seven nights in prison, to be followed by deportation.
It was not until June 2025, almost a year after the incident, that the couple discovered they had fallen foul of Qatar's draconian cybercrime laws when they were stopped at Doha Airport.
During the Iran War, similar measures have seen social media users prosecuted across the Gulf for posting images of Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Ms Stirling states that while hotels across the region are registered with Tripadvisor, and guests may feel at liberty leaving a review, there are major risks in doing so.
She said: “When it’s negative, they always bring a cybercrime case against you. Companies who wouldn’t dream of doing this in America or the UK will absolutely do it in the Middle East. They believe they’re preserving their reputation but in fact it’s the opposite.”
Mr Barratt paid the fine as a measure of goodwill and attempted twice to appeal his conviction, paying over £10,000 to lawyers. The court case for his second appeal was scheduled for October 14 last year, and Mr Barratt, who was in Qatar without his wife, was advised to leave the country beforehand or face imprisonment.
Unbeknownst to him, the court case was reportedly brought forward by five days and as he approached the airport, he found himself bundled into a police vehicle and taken to a detention centre, where he spent four days among hundreds of African and South Asian prisoners.
Summing up his experience, he said: “My view is, don’t go there, don’t take their money if you don’t expect to abide by their laws.”
But Mr Barratt remains aggrieved at the approach of Marriot International, adding: “They have their name over the door. They are an American organisation who you would expect to have similar values in the sense of safety.
“This is not about a Tripadvisor review. I was trying to protect my wife who thought she was going to be raped.”
In a statement reported in The Times, Marriot International said: “Marriott International does not tolerate harassment at its hotels. Guest safety and wellbeing are fundamental to our values, and we take any allegation of harassment involving our guests extremely seriously.
“A thorough review of the allegations raised during the guest's stay was conducted. While the claims were not substantiated by the available evidence, local authorities were notified and the guests were offered the opportunity to file a formal complaint, which, to our knowledge, was not pursued.”
The Standard has approached Marriot International for comment.
