Plush Explorer’s priority is to foster safe and welcoming travel experiences for all.

We expect our employees, customers and partners to treat each other with respect. That’s why we developed this set of guidelines that applies to the reviews, images and listings uploaded by our guests and partners. We want to make sure that the content you engage with on our site is safe and helpful.
When you post a review, image or listing on Plush Explorer, it needs to comply with these guidelines. They form part of our broader set of policies, including our terms and conditions and privacy notices. If your content doesn’t comply, we’ll remove it or get in touch with you to try and edit the comment to meet our guidelines.

Content standards

Our guidelines and the content standards below aim to keep the content on Booking.com relevant and appropriate for a global audience, but without limiting expression of strong opinions. They’re applicable regardless of the positive or negative sentiment of the comment.

Contributions should be travel related – the most helpful contributions are detailed and help others make better decisions. Don’t include personal, political, ethical or religious commentary. Promotional content will be removed and issues concerning Booking.com’s services should be routed to our Customer Service or Accommodation Service teams.

Contributions should be appropriate for a global audience – comments and media that include ‘hate speech’, discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit remarks, violence and the promotion of illegal activity are not permitted.

All content should be genuine and unique to the guest – reviews are most valuable when they are original and unbiased. Your contribution should be yours. Booking.com property partners must not post on behalf of guests or offer incentives in exchange for reviews. Attempts to lower the rating of a competitor by submitting a negative review won’t be tolerated.

Respect the privacy of others – refrain from including personal data, such as first and last names, telephone numbers, email addresses and other information regarding other persons in your posts.

Respect intellectual property – ensure that you own or have the right to use any intellectual property rights that might exist in the content you post, particularly images.

Guest reviews standards

Each review score is between 1 and 10. To get the overall score that you see on Booking.com, we add up all the review scores we’ve received and divide that total by the number of received review scores.
In addition, guests can give separate ‘subscores’ for specific travel experience aspects, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money and free Wi-Fi. Note that guests submit their subscores and their overall scores independently, so there’s no direct link between them.

You can review an accommodation that you booked through Booking.com if you stayed there or if you arrived at the accommodation but didn’t actually stay there. To edit a review you’ve already submitted, please contact our Customer Service team.

We have people and automated systems that specialise in detecting fake reviews submitted to Booking.com. If we find any, we delete them and, if necessary, take action against whoever is responsible. Anyone who spots something problematic can always report it to our Customer Service team and our Fraud team will investigate.

We don’t publish reviews that breach our guidelines on:

• Dangerous and disrespectful content
  • Hate, discrimination and harassment speech
  • Violent, offensive and restricted content
  • Animal cruelty
  • Content of a sexual nature
• Image and editorial guidelines
• Intellectual property, privacy and confidential data
• Spam, misleading content and deceptive practices
• Commercial content
• Non-stayed reservations

To make sure reviews are relevant, we may only accept reviews that are submitted within three months of checking out and we may stop showing reviews once they’re 36 months old – or if the accommodation has a change of ownership. An accommodation may choose to reply to a review.

When you see multiple reviews, the most recent ones will be at the top, subject to a few other factors, (what language a review is in, whether it’s just a rating or contains comments as well, etc). If you like, you can sort and/or filter them by date, review score, etc. We sometimes show external review scores from other well-known travel websites, but we always make it clear when we do this.

Reviews may contain translations powered by Google, not Booking.com. Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations, express or implied, including any warranties of accuracy, reliability and any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Content guidelines

Dangerous and disrespectful content

Hate, discrimination and harassment

Hate speech and discriminatory language is not permitted on Booking.com. We want all our guests and partners to feel safe and respected, so we don’t allow:

• Content promoting violence, discriminatory language or hatred against a person or groups based on the basis of who they are – this includes any form of discrimination based on the following characteristics: age, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, nationality, race, immigration status, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, caste, political opinion and serious diseases.
• Content that harasses, bullies or threatens others (or incites others to participate in these activities) – Booking.com should be a safe place for all our users and so we will take a firm stance with respect to any content that could be deemed intimidating, threatening, rude or disparaging.

Violent, offensive and restricted content

Booking.com is not a place for violent or offensive content, or content that’s deemed legally restricted based on local laws. We don’t allow:

• Content that promotes, facilitates or encourages any kind of violence against others – this includes threats of violence, recommending violence or any declaration to commit violence.
• Content that’s obscene, offensive or isn’t appropriate for all audiences.
• Content that offers, sells, advertises or facilitates the sale of regulated or restricted goods and services.
• Terrorism related content – includes content that promotes, supports or incites acts of terrorism, or that supports or represents any terrorist organisation, its leaders or associated violent activities. In addition, we don’t allow content that we deem, in our sole discretion and as aligned with the Consolidated United Nations Security Council Sanctions List, to promote, support or incite acts of violent extremism, or that supports or represents any organisation engaged in violent extremism.

Animal welfare

Animal cruelty isn’t tolerated by Booking.com. Guests, partners and employees are expected to respect domestic animals and wildlife and to foster living conditions for animals that align with our Animal Welfare Guidelines.

We don’t allow:

• Content that displays or promotes direct contact with wild animals
• Content that displays or promotes animals in captivity with bad welfare conditions
• Content relating to activities, entertainment or sport events that are known to cause distress and harm to animals

Content of a sexual nature

We don’t allow content that contains sexually explicit material, nudity or pornographic acts. This includes any content including text, digital and animated images that supports, promotes or depicts child sexual exploitation or sexualised content of suspected minors (also known as Child Sexual Abuse Material or CSAM).

Image and editorial guidelines

Photos and images are a valuable resource on Booking.com. In order to be helpful to our community, they need to be useful, informative and related to the actual travel experience.

We don’t allow:

• Images that don’t relate to the actual travel experience
• Images that contravene with any of the policies, standards or guidelines included here

Also, written content needs to be legible and related to the travel experience. We don’t allow content that’s not understandable, coherent or doesn’t make grammatical sense.

Intellectual property, privacy and confidential data

Intellectual property

Booking.com respects intellectual property rights and expects its guests and partners to do the same. Our policy is to:

• Review cases of notified intellectual property infringement and act to remove instances of infringing or suspected infringing content
• Disable accounts or otherwise restrict access to users who repeatedly infringe the intellectual property rights of others

If you’d like to report copyright infringement, you can do so using our copyright infringement reporting form.

Personal and other confidential data

Booking.com takes its privacy and data protection obligations seriously, in line with our applicable Privacy Statement.

We don’t allow content that may put the privacy of our guests and other data subjects at increased risk. For example, guests or partners erroneously sharing personal data about other persons, including but not limited to sensitive or special-category personal data. This also includes credit card numbers, national identification numbers, driver’s and other licence numbers, addresses or any other information that isn’t publicly accessible.

Spam, misleading content and deceptive practices

Booking.com aims to protect our guests and partners from reviews that aren’t based on the experience of a real customer, or content that isn’t related to the topic or experience of travelling.

We don’t allow:

• Content that isn’t relevant to Booking.com, the stay or actual travel experience
• Content that’s likely to mislead, deceive or confuse Booking.com users
• Any of our guests or partners to misrepresent themselves or impersonate another person

Commercial content

At Booking.com, we believe that contributions are most helpful when they are honest, unbiased and contain objective information. In particular, reviews left on Booking.com should reflect genuine guest experiences.

We don’t allow:

• Content created solely for the purpose of self-promotion, advertising or other commercial content
• Commercial content that promotes or advertises specific services
• Content that includes contact details or information designed to promote or advertise specific services
• A partner to review their own listing, business or accommodation

Non-stayed reservations

We value the opinion of our contributors. That’s why only a customer who has booked through Booking.com can write a review. If the guest arrives at the accommodation, they’ll be able to leave a review, even if they don’t complete their stay. However, if a reservation is cancelled before the check-in day, the guest won’t receive a review questionnaire.

If a review is written under these circumstances, we do allow:

• Reviews that contain critical information that would be relevant for a future guest
• Reviews that contain feedback about communication between the accommodation and the guest
• Reviews that are relevant to the travel experience

Content actions

Content verification and enforcement

Booking.com aims to reflect the most up-to-date reviews from our travellers. That’s why we have a fast turnaround on our content moderation.

The process of checking submitted reviews is as follows:

• The first round of checks is performed by our machine learning algorithms – these could be accommodation reviews and photos shared by guests, replies written by partners, or other types of content. From the moment we receive a piece of content, it takes the algorithm only seconds to approve the content. That’s why the large majority of content is approved by our algorithms and is then published on Booking.com.
• Content that wasn’t approved by the algorithms is routed to our team of moderators – when our algorithms identify potentially guideline-violating content, they send the content to our moderators for further review. We aim to review content within five business days and decide within that timeframe if it’s suitable to be published on Booking.com.
• After a review was published, it can still be removed at a later date – this can happen because machine learning algorithms are performing ongoing checks every day.

Once approved, content is accessible via our platform and our apps. If our moderators deem that content violates one of our policies (including our content standards and guidelines) it won’t be published. Once a piece of content is removed, the decision can be appealed or a new version of the content can be submitted to us.

Appealing a moderation decision

When we remove a review, photo or other content item you’ve posted, we’ll make sure to tell you why in a simple message. You can then edit your content to meet the standards set out in our guidelines or appeal the decision to remove your content, if you don’t agree with our moderation decision.

The appeal process

Once you’ve received a notification that states why your content was removed, you’ll be able to appeal the decision. To start the appeal, you can follow the link provided in the email letting you know your content was removed.

When you appeal the decision, our content moderators will review your content against our content guidelines once more and decide whether the content is appropriate to display on Booking.com. You’ll be notified of the outcome of our review by email.

Reporting content on Booking.com

At Booking.com, we work hard to maintain a platform filled with authentic travel experiences, appropriate for a global audience. If you ever come across illegal content on our platform please let us know. Your feedback is crucial in ensuring a secure environment for everyone. To report any content you think might be illegal, simply follow the link to our reporting form.