How reviews work

Public reviews are for the Voyay tours and the creator tours listed in the app. You can review a tour when all of these are true:

• You are signed in with a full account. Guest accounts can’t post public reviews.
• You started the tour in the Voyay app on your own account, and you ended it.
• For a paid creator tour: you bought it, and the purchase wasn’t refunded.
• It isn’t your own tour. Creators can’t review their own tours.

You have 90 days after ending the walk to write your review. Each person gets one review per tour. If you walk the same tour again, your new review replaces the old one instead of adding a second.

Personal tours that Voyay writes for you with AI don’t get public reviews. What you tell us about them, and what guests tell us, is private feedback. We never show it to anyone else and it isn’t part of any rating. We use it to make better tours.

Our server checks the rules above before it publishes a review. Published reviews carry a label that says exactly what we checked: Completed this tour in Voyay. That means the reviewer’s account had the tour in the app and ended it.

We don’t claim more than that. We don’t check GPS positions and can’t see whether someone stood at every stop, so we never call a review “GPS-verified”.

If you write your review in the app before ending the walk, it waits and goes live once you end the walk.

We publish every review that follows our rules, whether it gives one star or five. We don’t pick reviews, hide bad ones or push good ones up.

The same automatic check runs on every review, whatever its rating. A review that contains a link, an email address, a phone number or a swear word is held back until a person on our team has read it. They then publish it or take it down under the rules in Reporting a review.

Reviews are sorted by most recent first. You can switch to the highest or lowest ratings first.

Reviews written before public reviews started stay private. Their authors never agreed to having them shown, so they don’t appear anywhere and don’t count toward any rating.

The rating you see is the plain average of all published reviews of that tour, rounded to one decimal. Next to it we show how many ratings it is based on and how many people gave each number of stars.

Until a tour has 3 ratings we don’t show an average, because one or two ratings say very little. The tour is marked New instead. If its creator has at least 3 ratings across their tours, we may show that rating as well, clearly labelled as the creator’s.

When we order tours in a list, we may use a smoothed score instead of the plain average, so a tour with a single five-star review doesn’t jump above one with two hundred good reviews. The smoothed score counts every tour as if it started with 5 extra ratings at the average of all tours (a Bayesian average). We only use it for ordering. The rating shown on a tour is always the plain average.

If a buyer gets a refund, their review stays visible with the label Refunded, but it no longer counts toward the rating and it can’t be edited any more.

You can edit your review during the same 90 days. An edited review is labelled Edited. If the creator had already replied, the reply is marked as a reply to an earlier version of the review.

Creators can improve their tours after they go live. A review of an older version of a tour is labelled Earlier version.

A review shows your first name and the first letter of your last name, taken from your account (for example “Sanne V.”), and the month and year it was written. We don’t show your photo, your email address or the exact date. If your account has no name, you appear as “Voyay traveller”.

You can delete your review at any time, in the app or by emailing us. If you delete your Voyay account, we delete your reviews, the creator replies to them, the reports you made and your private feedback, and we work out the ratings again without them. More in our Privacy Policy.

Anyone signed in to Voyay can report a review, for example as spam, abusive, sharing personal information or not about the tour.

When a review gets 3 reports, it goes offline until a person on our team has checked it. If it follows the rules, we put it back and clear the reports.

A person always makes the decision to take a review down. When we do, we email the author the reason. If they think we got it wrong, they can reply to that email within 6 months and we will look at it again.

In the app you can also block a reviewer. You then no longer see their reviews; nobody else is affected and the reviewer isn’t told.

A creator can post one public reply to each review of their tours and edit it later. Replies follow the same rules as reviews: no links, email addresses, phone numbers or swear words. Creators only see the reviewer’s public name, not their account or contact details.

Creators may not offer refunds, discounts, free tours or anything else in exchange for changing or removing a review.

We don’t pay for reviews and we don’t let anyone else do it. Creators may not offer money, free tours or other rewards for a review, and may not review their own tours or ask friends to. When we find a review like that, we take it down.

Questions about a review, or think we made a mistake? Email us at hello [at] voyay dot app. The rules for what a review may say are in our Terms of Use.