Review policy

Who can leave a review

Anyone who has used a business listed on Houzie can review it. Before you write a review, we email you a sign-in link to confirm your email address. We don't publish your email, but we may use it to check that your review is genuine. You can review each business once.

How ratings work

Every review scores the business from 1 to 5 stars on six things: initial impression, punctuality, cleanliness, quality, value and overall opinion. A review's rating is the average of its six scores, and a business's rating is the average of all its published reviews. Each business profile also shows its average for each of the six.

Invited reviews

Businesses can ask their customers to review them on Houzie. We ask them to invite every customer, not only the happy ones. Reviews that come from a business's invitation are labelled Invited by the business and are checked in the same way as every other review.

How we check reviews

A person reads every review before it's published. Reviews marked Checked review have passed these checks, and Email confirmed means the reviewer confirmed their email address before writing it. We don't publish reviews that:

• Aren't about a real experience with the business
• Come from the business itself, its staff, family, or a competitor
• Were paid for or rewarded in any way
• Are abusive or discriminatory, or include personal information about other people

UK consumer law bans fake reviews, and so do we.

We don't remove reviews for being negative

Honest reviews, good and bad, are published. Businesses can't pay to remove a review or to have reviews hidden, and Featured businesses are treated the same as everyone else.

Businesses can reply

A business can sign in to Houzie with the email address on its listing and post a public reply under any review of their business. Replies follow the same rules as reviews, and we remove replies that break them.

Reporting a review

If you think a review breaks these rules, report it to us, and we'll look into it.