Guest Book · Standards
How this gets made.
Hotel reviews by people who paid for the room. Here is exactly how one gets made, and who pays for what.
What you're reading
Tripadvisor threw out 2.7 million fake reviews in 2024. More than half were written by the businesses themselves, by owners, staff, agencies, whoever they hired. Another 214,000 were written by a machine. That's one platform, one year, and only the ones anybody caught.
So: every entry comes off a real booking with a confirmation number we can pull up, filed by the guest who slept in the room. The writing is commissioned, and we say so at the top of every page. What we don't do is invent them.
The stay is verified
Every correspondent booked their trip through Room Service. At our size, we know who those guests are, and we wouldn't run an entry from anyone else. That's the whole credibility play.
Correspondents travel as guests, not as press. They don't announce themselves, they don't ask for anything, and they pay for the trip the way anyone else would.
Assignments are commissioned
Every assignment carries an honorarium set out in the brief, and what it's worth depends on what we're asking for: length, how many photographs and clips, how many properties, how fast we need it back.
What it never depends on is the verdict. File an entry saying the place was overpriced and the front desk couldn't be bothered, and it is settled exactly as the brief said. That isn't us being principled about it. A review anyone thinks was bought is worth nothing, and then neither is the next one.
Correspondents can take the honorarium as credit toward a future booking, as a direct payment, or as a donation passed along in full.
No hotel pays to appear here
Not for placement, not for coverage, not for tone. No property sees a draft before publication, and we don't take edits from one. Occasionally we'll put a specific factual claim to a hotel to confirm it, which is a different thing.
Room Service earns commission from some of the properties covered here. That's how the business works and we're not coy about it. It has no bearing on what runs, and if any of that ever changes we'll label it somewhere you can't miss.
What we edit
Length, clarity, structure, grammar, and legal risk. We use AI tools to help with that editing and with photo selection. We do not edit conclusions, ratings, or the substance of a criticism, and the correspondent reads and approves the final version before anyone else sees it.
Correspondents don't write about us. Entries are about the property. Praise for Room Service gets cut, and so does criticism of us. Testimonials live somewhere else for a reason.
Disclosure
Every entry carries a note under the byline stating that the piece was commissioned and that the correspondent booked and paid for the trip themselves. Staff-written pieces carry their own version of that note.
It sits with the review, not in the footer. If a disclosure needs finding, it isn't one.
Corrections
Hotels change, and sometimes we get something wrong. If a factual detail in an entry is out of date or incorrect, write to correspondents@roomservice.inc. We'll check it and amend the page with a note on what changed. We don't quietly rewrite verdicts.
Want to write one?
Assignments are open to guests who book through us. Read the correspondent brief, or go straight to the terms.