This article will take you behind the scenes of Booking.com’s review system, explaining how reviews are calculated, moderated, and displayed. We want to make sure you understand how our system works and how you can contribute to its accuracy and helpfulness.
Review Scores: What They Mean
Every review on Booking.com is assigned a score between 1 and 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. To get the overall score you see for a property, we add up all the individual review scores and then divide by the total number of reviews. We’re currently testing a new weighted review system in Malta and Iceland (excluding hotel and vacation rental chains). This system gives more weight to recent reviews, meaning they have a larger impact on the overall score.
In addition to an overall score, guests can give separate subscores for different aspects of their stay, such as 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.
Your Feedback: Staying Authentic
You can review a property you’ve booked through Booking.com if you’ve stayed there or even if you arrived but didn’t stay. If you need to edit a review you’ve already submitted, please contact our Customer Service team.
We take review integrity seriously, and we have teams of people and automated systems that are constantly working to detect and remove fake reviews. If we find a fake review, we’ll delete it and, if necessary, take action against the person responsible.
We encourage you to report any suspicious activity to our Customer Service team so our Fraud team can investigate.
Ensuring Review Quality and Relevance
We publish every review we receive, positive or negative, but we won’t display any review that:
- Impersonates another person.
- Violates our review guidelines.
To ensure that reviews are relevant and up-to-date, we may only accept reviews submitted within 3 months of your stay, and we may stop showing reviews that are older than 36 months or if the property has changed ownership.
Properties can reply to reviews.
Browsing and Sorting Reviews
When you see multiple reviews, the most recent ones will appear at the top, along with other factors like review language, whether it includes comments, and if it’s anonymous. You can also sort and filter reviews by date, score, type of traveler, and more.
We sometimes show external review scores from other travel websites, making it clear when we’ve done so.
Review Guidelines: Keeping It Safe and Fair
Our review guidelines aim to ensure that the content on Booking.com is relevant, family-friendly, and allows for diverse opinions. These guidelines apply regardless of the sentiment of the comment.
Here are some key aspects of our guidelines:
- Contributions should be travel-related.
- Don’t include personal, political, ethical, or religious opinions.
- Promotional content will be removed.
- Issues with Booking.com services should be directed to our Customer Service or Accommodation Service teams.
- Contributions should be appropriate for a global audience.
- Avoid using profanity, discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit content, violence, and promotion of illegal activity.
- All content should be genuine and unique to the guest.
- Don’t post reviews on behalf of others or offer incentives for reviews.
- Respect the privacy of others.
- The opinions expressed in reviews belong to the customers and properties, not Booking.com.
Review Display and Translation
By default, reviews are sorted by date and other criteria to show the most relevant ones, including your language, reviews with text, and non-anonymous reviews. You can also sort reviews by type of traveler, score, and more.
This service may contain translations powered by Google. Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations.
The Takeaway
This article provided a detailed look into Booking.com’s review system, covering how reviews are calculated, moderated, and displayed. By understanding these guidelines and practices, you can contribute to a trustworthy and valuable review system that helps travelers make informed decisions.
