Review Policy

1. Our principles

Reviews only work if both sides can be honest without being punished for it. Three commitments follow from that, and the rest of this page is how we keep them.

• Neither side can retaliate. You cannot see what the other person wrote before your own review is locked in.
• Ratings do not affect where a listing ranks in search, and a review written here cannot move a listing up. There is no search advantage to chase, so there is no reason to pressure anyone for stars.
• If we remove a review, we tell you why. A removal you cannot see a reason for is indistinguishable from censorship.

This page covers reviews written on TabiVista. It also explains how we handle reviews imported from Airbnb, which appear on many listings and follow different rules because we did not collect them.

2. Who can leave a review

Only people who actually completed a stay. Specifically:

• The booking must be marked completed. Cancelled, declined, and upcoming bookings cannot be reviewed.
• The review must be submitted within 14 days of check-out. After that the window closes for that booking.
• Each booking allows one review from the guest and one from the host. You cannot add a second or replace the first.

There is no way to buy, request, or generate a review on TabiVista without a completed booking behind it. A star rating alone is enough to submit, and written text is optional, so a short review is a real one.

Reviews are final once submitted. We do not offer editing, because an editable review can be changed under pressure after the other party sees it. Take a moment before you send it.

3. When a review becomes public

Reviews are double-blind. Your review stays hidden from public view until any one of these happens:

• Both you and the other party have submitted a review for that booking, or
• 14 days have passed since you submitted yours, or
• For a guest's review, the host has publicly responded to it.

Until one of those is met, an unpublished review also has no effect on the listing's public score. That matters more than it sounds: if an unrevealed rating moved the average, a host could work out roughly what you wrote before deciding what to write about you.

A host can read a guest's review before it is public, but only once their own side is locked: they must first submit their review of the guest, or let their review window close unused. Responding publishes the guest's review and the response together; a host cannot change a review, and cannot make one disappear by responding. By the time either side reads the other's words, their own are already locked.

4. Reviews and search ranking

Ratings never affect search ranking, and they never decide whether a listing is featured. Our default search order is featured listings first, then a rotation that gives each host's newest listing a fair position, then most recent. A rating is not part of that calculation. Featured placement is set by us by hand, and cannot be bought or earned with a score.

Two places do use a score, and we would rather name them than have you find them. The Top Vacation Stays carousel on our homepage, and the Stays Nearby carousel on our restaurant and experience pages, are both ordered partly by rating. Both of them read the rating imported from Airbnb. Reviews written on TabiVista do not feed into either one, so no review you leave here, and no review a host leaves about you, can move a listing's placement anywhere on this site. You can also sort search results by rating yourself, if that is what you want to see.

This is a deliberate design decision rather than a temporary state. When a score controls placement, a review stops being feedback and becomes leverage, and hosts start managing reviews instead of managing properties. We would rather show you an honest three stars than a pressured five.

5. What belongs in a review

Write about the stay. Your own experience, described accurately, is always allowed, including a critical one. Subjective judgments are fine. If the kitchen felt too small for you, that is useful to the next traveller and we will not remove it for being an opinion.

These are not allowed, from either side:

• Retaliation. Reviews written to punish someone for a complaint, a review, a damage claim, or a dispute.
• Extortion. Offering, demanding, or threatening a review to obtain a refund, a discount, a payout, or the removal of another review.
• Content about someone else. Third parties' personal details, or someone's race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability, or immigration status.
• Private information. Phone numbers, email addresses, exact addresses, ID documents, or payment details, whether yours or anyone else's.
• Things that did not happen to you. Second-hand accounts, events from a different booking, or a stay you did not take.
• Incentivised or fabricated reviews. Paid, traded, or written by anyone other than the guest or host on the booking.
• Abuse. Threats, harassment, slurs, or sexual content.

The same standard applies to both sides. A host's review of a guest is held to exactly the rules above, not a looser version of them. If anything, reviews about a named individual deserve more care than reviews about a property.

Host responses follow the same rules. A response is for adding context, not for arguing with the guest or publishing details about them.

6. When we remove a review

We remove a review when it breaks a rule in section 5. That is the whole list. We do not remove reviews because:

• They are negative, or the rating is low
• A host disagrees with them, or asks us to
• They mention a refund, a cancellation, or a complaint
• They would lower a listing's score or cost us a booking

If we remove a review, we email the person who wrote it and say which rule it broke. A removal without a stated reason is not something we do.

Removing a review does not remove the underlying rating from history: a review taken down for breaking these rules is excluded from the listing's public score, in both directions. We do not quietly keep the stars and drop the words.

7. How to contest a review

If a review about you or your property breaks one of the rules in section 5, email support@tabivista.com from the address on your account with:

• The booking reference
• Which rule you believe it breaks
• Anything that supports it, such as message history on the booking

What happens next: a person reads it. Not a form, not an automated filter. We read the review, the booking, and the messages between you and the other party, and we come back to you with a decision.

We are a small team and we would rather not state a response time we cannot keep at every volume.

Disagreeing with a review is not grounds for removal. If a guest describes their stay accurately and unfavourably, that review stands. The remedy available to a host is the public response, which sits underneath the review and is read by everyone who reads the review.

8. Reviews imported from Airbnb

Many listings on TabiVista were imported from Airbnb by their host, and that import includes the property's existing Airbnb reviews. We show them because a listing with no reviews tells a traveller nothing, and those reviews describe the same property.

We think you should know exactly what you are reading, so:

• Every listing shows where its reviews came from. Alongside the rating you will see the count from each source, so you can tell at a glance how much of a listing's history was earned on TabiVista and how much came across from Airbnb. Today most listings show only an Airbnb count, because most of what we hold arrived in an import.
• They were collected under Airbnb's rules, not ours. The policy on this page describes how we handle reviews. We cannot vouch for how a review we did not collect was moderated, and we do not claim otherwise.
• They are refreshed, not frozen. A host can re-sync their listing from their dashboard at any time, which pulls in newer Airbnb reviews, and we run syncs ourselves from time to time. There is no live connection, so what you see reflects the most recent sync rather than this moment.
• A sync merges, it does not overwrite. New reviews are added alongside the ones already stored, and a sync that comes back empty leaves what we hold untouched. We keep up to 1,000 reviews for a listing; on the rare listing that goes past that, the oldest drop off as newer ones arrive. We do not edit imported reviews, we do not remove them to improve a score, and we never write one ourselves.

Once a listing has 5 or more TabiVista reviews, its displayed rating and review count switch entirely to TabiVista reviews. We never blend the two into a single average, because a blended number would hide which platform's standards produced it.

9. What hosts see about guests

Reviews go both ways, so guests are reviewed too. When you request a booking, the host may see a short reputation summary drawn from your previous completed stays, including whether previous hosts indicated they would host you again.

Two limits on this:

• A host cannot see their own past review of you reflected back in that summary, so it cannot be used to quietly re-litigate a past disagreement.
• It is a summary shown to hosts considering your request. It is not published on your public profile.

If you believe a host's review of you breaks the rules in section 5, contest it using section 7. This is the same process hosts use, and it is deliberately not an easier or harder one.

See our Privacy Policy for how this information is stored and shared.

10. How scores are calculated

• For reviews written on TabiVista, a listing's star rating is the average of the overall rating reviewers gave, not an average of the individual categories. Below the 5-review cutover described in section 8, the score shown is the one Airbnb calculated, which we import as a single number rather than work out ourselves.
• Only published reviews count toward it. Reviews still inside the double-blind window are excluded until they are revealed.
• Guest reviews and host reviews are kept separate. A host's review of a guest never affects the property's rating.
• We do not weight, curate, or hand-pick which reviews appear. Listings show their reviews most recent first.

11. Contact us

Questions about this policy, or about a specific review:

• Contest a review: support@tabivista.com
• General inquiries: hello@tabivista.com
• Contact form: Contact Us

This policy sits alongside our Terms of Service, which govern user content generally. Where this page describes how reviews work in practice, the Terms remain the binding agreement.