Booking.com Reputation Management

Booking.com scores run 1–10, not the 1–5 stars used on most review platforms. A property’s displayed Guest Review Score is a weighted average of every individual guest score from the trailing 36 months, with more recent reviews counted more heavily than older ones — so a property’s score can keep moving even without a single new negative stay, simply as older high scores age out of the window.

Guests can also leave separate "subscores" for specific aspects of the stay — location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value, and free WiFi — but these are submitted independently of the overall score, with no fixed formula linking one to the other. A guest can leave a 9 overall while scoring cleanliness lower, or vice versa.

The single most important structural fact: Booking.com reviews come exclusively from guests who booked and completed a stay (or arrived but didn’t stay) through Booking.com itself. Booking.com’s own guidelines put it directly — "The only way to leave a review is to first make a booking." Booking.com automatically emails the review invitation about 48 hours after check-out, and the guest has three months to submit it. There is no public review form, no way to review a property you didn’t book through the platform, and no route for a business, competitor, or third party to add a review from outside that closed loop.

Because reviews are guest-verified by design, Booking.com’s guidelines separately prohibit properties from posting on behalf of guests or offering incentives — discounts, upgrades, refunds, or anything else — in exchange for a review, and prohibit using reviews to attack a competitor’s rating.