Review and moderation policy

Our promise. Every review on VacationGuide is meant to be a real person's genuine experience. Businesses can't pay to remove reviews, change ratings or rank higher.

Who can review

• Anyone 18 or over with a VacationGuide account.
• One review per venue per visit. You give the month you visited.
• Reviews linked to a VacationGuide booking show a "Booked through VacationGuide" badge. Others show "Not verified as a VacationGuide booking".

Not allowed

• Reviews that aren't based on your own genuine experience.
• Reviews you were paid for or rewarded for in any way: money, discounts, free stays, meals or entry. The only exception is if the reward was offered for any review, good or bad, and you say so in the review.
• Reviews of a business you own, work for, are related to or compete with.
• Reviews written by or for someone else, or several accounts for one person.
• Abuse, discrimination, personal data about staff or guests, or content that is unlawful.

How we check reviews

1. Before publishing, automated checks look for warning signs: new accounts posting many reviews, repeated text, links, and reviews from the same device or network as the business.
2. Flagged reviews are held for a person to check. We aim to decide within 3 working days.
3. Anyone can report a published review with the "Report" button. We investigate every report.
4. We review our risks every 6 months and publish a short summary of what we found and changed.

What we never do

• Remove or hide a review because it's negative.
• Give positive reviews more prominence than negative ones. Reviews are shown newest first by default.
• Write reviews ourselves, or let partners or businesses write them.
• Change a rating because a business pays us.

How ratings are worked out

The VacationGuide rating is the plain average of all published VacationGuide reviews for that place, shown with the number of reviews. Google ratings come from Google, are labelled "Google rating" and are never mixed into ours. Review summaries, where shown, are drawn only from published reviews and are labelled as summaries.

Businesses

Businesses can claim their listing and reply publicly to reviews. They can report a review they believe breaks this policy, but they can't have a review removed just because they disagree with it.

If we remove your review

We tell you why. You can appeal within 14 days by replying to that email. A different person reviews the appeal and decides within 7 days.

Sanctions

We remove fake or incentivised reviews. We may suspend the accounts involved. Where a business is responsible, we label its listing "We've removed reviews from this business that broke our rules" for 6 months, and may report it to the CMA.

Forum posts follow our Community Guidelines. They are screened before they appear.

Last updated: [date].