How reviews work

Who can leave a review

Only people who booked and completed a tour through Panioncan leave a review. There is no public review form. The invitation goes to the email address on the booking, and the link in it carries the booking's private reference. Every review is stored against that booking, so we can show that a real, completed purchase sits behind each one.

One booking gives one review. A traveller can rate the tour from 1 to 5, rate the person or company who recommended it, and write a comment about each.

How and when we ask

We send one invitation the day after the tour and one reminder about a week later if no review has arrived. Everyone who completed a booking gets the same invitation. We never choose who to ask based on how we think the tour went.

What we publish

We publish every review we receive, good and bad, in the order it was written. Reviews are not read or approved before they appear. We show the reviewer's first name as given at booking and, where we know it, their country. We never show email addresses or full names.

We remove a review only when it:

• is unlawful, threatening or discriminatory,
• contains personal data about someone other than the reviewer,
• is not about the tour (for example, about a different company or a website issue),
• or we can show it did not come from the customer who made the booking.

We keep a record of every removal and the reason. We do not remove a review because it is negative, and we do not hide negative reviews behind positive ones.

Nothing is paid for

We do not pay for reviews, offer discounts or gifts for them, or reward positive ones. We never ask tour operators or their staff to write reviews, and we do not accept reviews written on someone's behalf. If we ever run a promotion connected to reviews, it will be open to every customer regardless of what they write, it will be stated on the review, and those reviews will not count toward any average.

How the average is calculated

A tour's rating is the plain average of every published tour rating it has received, rounded to one decimal. All reviews weigh the same. There is no weighting by date, length, or anything else.

We show an average only once a tour has at least 6 verified reviews. Below that we show the individual reviews and the count, because a number built on two or three opinions says less than the opinions themselves. When the same tour has been listed more than once, for example after an operator replaced the product in its booking system, the reviews of all its listings count together.

What tour operators can and cannot do

Operators see the reviews of their tours. They cannot edit, hide or delete a review, and they cannot choose which reviews are shown. Where a reply feature is available, an operator's reply is published under the review and marked as coming from the operator.

Reviews on other websites

Paniondoes not display reviews from Tripadvisor, Google or other platforms, and our ratings never include them. Many operators are also reviewed there. Those reviews are collected under those platforms' own rules, which we do not verify.

What we tell search engines

The rating and review count we mark up for search engines on a tour page are exactly the ones shown on that page, from the same verified reviews. We do not mark up ratings on listing pages, and we do not mark up any review we did not collect ourselves.

Questions or disputes

If you believe a review breaks these rules, or you wrote a review and want it corrected or withdrawn, write to hello@panion.travel. We answer within five working days.