How reviews work

The short version

• A review with a “Stayed here” mark was written by a guest whose booking went through this site, was confirmed by the property, and reached its checkout date without the property reporting otherwise. We know they were there.
• A review without the mark was written by a signed-in member about a place they say they visited. We have not checked that, and we do not claim to have.
• Nobody is paid, discounted, or rewarded for a review, by us or by a property through us.
• Every review is published as written, immediately. We remove reviews only for the reasons listed below, and we never remove one for being negative.

What “Stayed here” means, exactly

Properties that take booking requests through this site have every request recorded. A request becomes a stay only when the property confirms it and the checkout date passes; the property has two days after checkout to tell us the guest did not arrive. Once that window closes, the stay is recorded as having happened and the guest is sent one invitation to review it.

A review written from that invitation is tied to that stay in our records. That is what the mark reflects. It is set by our server when the review is saved, and no form or account setting can add it — a review submitted any other way cannot carry it, whatever it claims.

Each stay can be reviewed once. A guest who returns can review the second stay as well; that is a second review of the same property, and both are shown.

Reviews without the mark

Most properties listed here do not take bookings through this site, so for most of them a verified review is not possible. Members can still review those places, and reviews of partner properties from stays booked elsewhere are welcome too. These reviews require a signed-in account and are limited to one per member per property. We do not check that the member visited. They are shown with the visit month the member gives, if any, and without the mark.

Incentives

None. We do not pay for reviews, offer discounts for them, or run competitions around them, and our agreement with partner properties does not allow them to do so through this site either. The invitation email says so in as many words. If a property offers you something for a review, we would like to know.

How the average is calculated

The overall rating shown for a property is the plain arithmetic mean of the overall ratings of all its published reviews, on a scale of one to five, verified and unverified alike. Nothing is weighted by recency, by helpfulness votes, or by whether the reviewer stayed through us. The count beside it is the number of published reviews; the number “from verified stays” is shown separately and is never added to anything.

Google ratings, where shown, come from Google and are labelled as such. They are never combined with ours.

Removal

A review is hidden only if it is not about the property, contains personal data about a third party, is abusive, or is found to be written by or for the property. A property cannot have a review removed by asking. Hidden reviews leave the count and the average.

A property can report a review to us. A report changes nothing on its own: the review stays up while we read it, unless it plainly breaks a rule above, in which case we may take it off the page while we look. That is a pause, not a decision, and the review comes back unless it meets one of the reasons above. Hidden reviews are kept, not deleted, so a dispute can be settled by reading the text.

Replies from the property

A property may answer a review. The answer is shown under the review, marked as the property’s response and dated, and it changes nothing about the rating or the average. A reply is the other side of the story, not a vote. Properties write their own replies from their account; for a property without one, a reply it sends us is posted on its behalf, in its words.

Questions

If a review looks wrong to you — yours or someone else’s — write to hello@winery-hotels.com. See also how we rank properties.