How reviews and ratings work, and what's prohibited.
Last updated: 8 August 2026
Effective Date: 8 August 2026
Last Updated: 8 August 2026
This Policy governs the review and rating features actually implemented on Onyatrips: a 1–5 star rating with an accompanying comment, submitted against a place or a group, publicly displayed with the reviewer's name and profile photo. It distinguishes this User-generated review content from Onyatrips' own editorial destination content (governed by the Terms and Conditions' "Place Discovery & Recommendations Terms" module). Where this Policy and the Terms and Conditions overlap on content standards, the Terms and Conditions control; this Policy is the detailed, review-specific framework.
This Policy governs reviews and ratings submitted by Users about places and groups on Onyatrips. It explains who can review, what a review must and must not contain, how ratings are calculated and displayed, and how we handle disputes, manipulation, and legal complaints about review content.
Confirmed current functionality: a User may submit a 1–5 star rating with an accompanying text comment against a specific target — a place or a group. Our records confirm a database constraint limiting a given User to one review per target. Submitted reviews are displayed publicly, including the reviewer's real name and profile photo (reviews are not anonymous), and can be individually flagged for administrative review.
Not currently confirmed as existing: a formal "verified booking" or "verified stay" badge tied to a completed transaction; a separate review-eligibility gate requiring proof of participation (e.g., group membership or a completed booking) before a review can be submitted; a business-response feature; a review-helpfulness voting mechanism; and photo/video attachments specific to reviews (as distinct from the general upload system).
It is important to distinguish three categories of content that may appear near each other on a place's page:
Any registered, authenticated User may submit a review against a place or group target, subject to the one-review-per-target-per-user limit and the content standards in this Policy.
We do not currently operate a "Verified Review" badge or equivalent trust signal tied to confirmed participation, booking, or attendance. A review is attributed to the authenticated account that submitted it (with real name and photo shown publicly), which provides accountability, but this is not the same as confirming the reviewer actually stayed at, attended, or experienced what they describe. This Policy does not claim otherwise. If a verified-review system (e.g., tied to a completed booking) is introduced in the future, it will be clearly disclosed and distinguished from unverified reviews.
The following are prohibited, consistent with the "Prohibited Content" clause of the Terms and Conditions' User-Generated Content module:
Edge case — competitor posting a genuine review: a competitor is not barred from submitting a review reflecting a genuine personal experience with a business (for example, if they genuinely stayed at a competing hotel); what is prohibited is posting a review in bad faith, without a genuine underlying experience, to manipulate that business's standing.
Reviews submitted in exchange for payment, free products/services, or other incentives, without clear disclosure of that incentive, are prohibited. Reviews from a business's own employees, owners, or immediate business associates about their own listing are prohibited unless clearly and prominently disclosed as such. Where a genuine conflict of interest exists (for example, a reviewer with a personal or financial relationship to the business being reviewed), it should be disclosed in the review itself.
A business may encourage genuine customers to leave a review generally. A business must not: selectively solicit only customers it expects to leave positive reviews while discouraging others ("review gating"); offer an incentive conditioned on leaving a positive review specifically (as opposed to a review generally); attempt to have a genuine negative review removed through a false claim (for example, a false copyright or legal complaint, see Section 18); or otherwise attempt to suppress, bury, or manipulate visibility of legitimate reviews.
Edge case — a legitimate negative review after a dispute: a User is entitled to leave a genuine, honest negative review reflecting a real dispute or bad experience with a business, even where the business disagrees with the characterization. This is not "manipulation," and a business's disagreement with a review's content is addressed through the business-response mechanism described in Section 14 (where it exists) or through a flag/complaint process — not through retaliation, false legal claims, or coercion.
A review must not contain: content prohibited under the Terms and Conditions' User-Generated Content module (defamation, false information, illegal content, spam, malware links, scams, adult/sexual content, hate speech, violence, impersonation, or harassment); another person's private information (doxxing) — including staff members' personal details beyond what is relevant to the service experience; sexually explicit or violent content; or promotional/advertising content, including affiliate links or promotion of a competing business.
Reviews naturally mix subjective opinion ("the room felt cramped") with factual claims ("the room had no working air conditioning"). We do not independently fact-check the factual claims within reviews before or after publication, beyond the manual flag-review process described in Section 15. Where a review contains a serious allegation (for example, of a crime, fraud, or safety incident), we treat this as a matter warranting closer moderation attention if flagged, but we do not require documentary evidence before a review can be published, and we do not adjudicate factual disputes between a reviewer and a business — our role is to enforce this Policy's content standards, not to determine the truth of a contested factual claim, except where required to respond to a valid legal process (see Section 18).
Ratings are stored as individual 1–5 star values per target; we do not currently publish a documented rating-aggregation methodology (such as a recency-weighted average or a Bayesian/weighted approach accounting for review volume) beyond that. This Policy does not claim a specific weighting methodology (such as weighting by recency or reviewer trust score) is currently applied, since none was confirmed. If and when a specific calculation methodology is adopted, it will be described here so Users and businesses can understand how a displayed score is derived.
We do not currently operate a sponsored-listing, paid-placement, or advertising system that would place a business above others in ranking or search results. If a paid-placement feature is introduced in the future, sponsored results will be clearly and distinctly labeled as such and separated from organic ranking, and this Policy will be updated to describe how that separation is maintained and how review/rating data does, or does not, factor into paid placement.
We do not currently operate an automated review-fraud detection system (such as pattern analysis for coordinated posting, IP/device clustering, or an AI classifier trained on review manipulation signals). Detection today relies on the flag mechanism described in Section 15 and manual administrative review. We do not claim an automated detection capability that does not exist.
We do not currently offer a dedicated feature allowing a business to publicly respond to a review on the Platform. A business wishing to address a review can currently only do so by contacting Onyatrips support (see Section 21) or, where applicable, the reviewing User directly through legitimate means. If a business-response feature is introduced, this Policy will be updated with response-content standards (professional, factual, non-retaliatory) and any moderation applied to responses.
Any review can be flagged for administrative review; flagged reviews are reviewed manually and may be removed if found to violate this Policy or the Terms and Conditions. We may also remove a review without a prior flag where we independently identify a clear violation. Removal of a review is not an admission that its content was false, and retention of a review is not confirmation that its content is accurate — see the disclaimers in Section 7 of the Disclaimer.
We do not currently have a formal, structured appeals workflow specific to review removal, separate from the general appeals approach described in the Community Guidelines. A reviewer or business that disputes a moderation decision may contact us at the address in Section 21; requests are handled manually, without a committed SLA, until a formal process is built.
Consistent with the Community Guidelines and Terms and Conditions, violations of this Policy may result in content removal, warnings, feature restrictions, account suspension, or termination, scaled to severity and repetition. A business found to have engaged in review manipulation (fake reviews, review gating, retaliatory conduct) is subject to the enforcement framework in the Business Listing Policy, in addition to any action against the specific reviews involved.
Where a review is the subject of a legitimate legal complaint (for example, a credible defamation claim, or a copyright/trademark complaint concerning content within a review), we assess it under the relevant process — defamation-adjacent complaints are assessed against this Policy's content standards and applicable law; copyright/trademark complaints follow the Copyright Policy. We do not automatically remove a review because someone complains about it — a complaint is evaluated on its merits, and we are alert to the possibility of abusive complaints intended to suppress a genuine, lawful review (see Section 8).
We do not currently publish aggregate statistics on review removals, flags, or enforcement actions. We may consider doing so as the review ecosystem matures.
We may update this Policy as review-related features evolve. Material changes will be reflected in an updated "Last Updated" date above.
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