Booking.com is committed to providing accurate and reliable review information. Here’s a breakdown of how we calculate review scores and what we do to ensure the quality of reviews on our platform:
How we calculate review scores
Each review on Booking.com is assigned a score from 1 to 10. To get the overall score for a property, we add up all the review scores and divide by the total number of reviews. In Malta and Iceland (excluding hotel and vacation rental chains), we’re currently using a weighted system, giving more recent reviews a bigger impact on the overall score. This helps to reflect the most up-to-date experiences.
In addition to the overall score, guests can provide separate “subscores” for specific areas like location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money, and free Wi-Fi. These subscores are submitted independently of the overall score, so there’s no direct link between them.
Reviewing an accommodation
You can review an accommodation you’ve booked through Booking.com if you’ve stayed there or if you arrived but didn’t stay. To edit a review you’ve already submitted, please contact our Customer Service team.
Fighting fake reviews
We’re serious about keeping fake reviews off our platform. We use both people and automated systems to detect and remove any fraudulent reviews. We also take action against those responsible for submitting fake reviews.
If you see something suspicious, please report it to our Customer Service team so our Fraud team can investigate.
Review guidelines
We want to publish all reviews, positive and negative, but we remove any review that:
- Impersonates someone else (e.g., the writer claims to be someone they’re not).
- Violates our review guidelines.
To ensure reviews are relevant, we may only accept reviews submitted within 3 months of checking out. We may also stop showing reviews after 36 months or if the property changes ownership.
Review display
When you see multiple reviews, the most recent ones will be at the top. This order may be influenced by the review language, whether it includes text or just a rating, and whether it’s anonymous or not. You can sort and filter reviews by date, score, and other criteria.
We may also display external review scores from other travel websites, and we will always clearly indicate when this is done.
Staying relevant and family-friendly
Our review guidelines aim to keep the content on Booking.com relevant and family-friendly without limiting the expression of strong opinions. They apply regardless of the sentiment of the comment.
What’s considered appropriate
Here are some key things to keep in mind when submitting a review:
- Focus on travel: Reviews should be relevant to travel. Please avoid personal, political, ethical, or religious commentary.
- Be helpful: The most helpful reviews are detailed and informative, providing valuable insights for others.
- Keep it global: Use language appropriate for a global audience. Avoid profanity, hate speech, discrimination, threats, sexually explicit remarks, violence, and promotion of illegal activities.
- Be genuine and unique: Reviews are most valuable when they are original and unbiased. Don’t post on behalf of guests or offer incentives for reviews.
- Respect privacy: We make an effort to obscure personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, website addresses, social media accounts, and other sensitive details.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in reviews are those of Booking.com customers and properties, not Booking.com. We do not accept responsibility for any reviews or responses. We act as a distributor (without any obligation to verify) and not a publisher of these comments and responses.
Sorting and translation
By default, reviews are sorted by date and other criteria to display the most relevant ones, including language, reviews with text, and non-anonymous reviews. Other sorting options (by type of traveler, by score, etc.) may be available.
This service may contain translations powered by Google. Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations.
In summary, Booking.com is committed to providing accurate and reliable review information. Our review system uses a combination of automated systems and human oversight to ensure the quality and relevance of reviews, while promoting a respectful and family-friendly environment.
