This article explains how Booking.com calculates and displays reviews, ensuring you get the most helpful and honest feedback from other travelers.
Calculating Your Overall Review Score
Every review submitted to Booking.com is rated on a scale of 1 to 10. To determine the overall score you see for a property, we add up all the review scores and divide that total by the number of reviews received.
We’re currently testing a new weighted review system in several locations, including Malta, Iceland, Australia, Greece, Brazil, and North Carolina. In these regions, newer reviews carry more weight in the overall score calculation, making it more relevant to recent experiences.
In addition to the overall score, guests can submit separate “subscores” for specific areas, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money, and free Wi-Fi. It’s important to note that these subscores and the overall score are submitted independently, so they aren’t directly linked.
Writing and Editing Reviews
You can write a review for a property if you’ve stayed there or even if you just arrived but didn’t stay. If you need to edit a review you’ve already submitted, please contact our Customer Service team.
Combating Fake Reviews
We have a team of dedicated people and automated systems that work tirelessly to identify and remove fake reviews. If a fake review is detected, we’ll delete it and take appropriate action against those responsible.
You can also help us by reporting any suspicious reviews to our Customer Service team, which will be investigated by our Fraud team.
What Happens to Your Review?
Ideally, we would publish every review we receive, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. However, we won’t display any review that includes or refers to the following:
- Impersonation: A review claiming to be written by someone other than the actual reviewer.
- Violations of our review guidelines.
To ensure the relevance of reviews, we may only accept reviews submitted within 3 months of checkout and may stop displaying reviews after 36 months. We may also remove reviews if the property changes ownership.
Properties are also able to respond to reviews.
Sorting and Filtering Reviews
When you see multiple reviews, the most recent ones will appear at the top, taking into consideration factors like language, whether the review includes text or just a rating, and whether it’s anonymous.
For your convenience, you can sort and filter reviews based on factors like time of year, review score, and other criteria.
External Review Scores
We may sometimes show external review scores from other reputable travel websites. In these cases, we clearly indicate that the score is from an external source.
Our Guidelines
Our guidelines aim to ensure that the content on Booking.com is relevant, family-friendly, and allows for a wide range of opinions, while also upholding our commitment to ethical and respectful communication.
Here’s a breakdown of our guidelines:
- Contributions should be travel-related. Provide detailed information that helps other travelers make informed decisions.
- Avoid personal opinions and commentary. Stick to travel-related topics and refrain from expressing personal, political, ethical, or religious viewpoints.
- No promotional content or advertising. Promotional content will be removed, and issues related to Booking.com’s services should be directed to our Customer Service or Accommodation Service teams.
- Be respectful of a global audience. Refrain from using profanity or attempting to disguise profanity. Comments and media containing hate speech, discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit content, violence, or promotion of illegal activities are strictly prohibited.
- Be genuine and original. Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Please refrain from posting on behalf of guests or offering incentives for reviews.
- Respect the privacy of others. We will make every effort to obscure personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, website addresses, social media accounts, and similar details.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in reviews are those of Booking.com customers and properties, and not of Booking.com. We do not accept responsibility for the content of reviews or responses. We are a distributor, not a publisher, and we do not verify the accuracy of reviews.
Sorting Reviews
By default, reviews are sorted based on the date of the review and other factors, including your language, reviews with text, and non-anonymous reviews. You may also have additional sorting options available, such as sorting by type of traveler or review score.
Translations
This service may include translations powered by Google. Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations, including any warranties of accuracy, reliability, and any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
We hope this article has helped you understand how our review system works and how you can contribute to creating a trustworthy and helpful resource for travelers around the world. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Customer Service team.
