Content Standards: Overview

Our guidelines and the content standards below aim to keep the content on DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za relevant and appropriate for a global audience, but without limiting the 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 DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za’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. DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za 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 DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za, 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 DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za if you stayed there or if you arrived at the accommodation but didn’t 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 DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za. 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 DestinationSouthAfrica.co.za. 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.