Correspondent terms.

Working draft. This version is published for transparency while our attorney reviews it. The terms attached to your assignment brief are the ones that govern that assignment.

These terms govern participation in the Room Service Guest Book correspondent program. They apply between you and Room Service, Inc. Accepting an assignment brief means accepting these terms.

1 · Who can be a correspondent

1.1 You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter into a contract.

1.2 You must have booked the relevant stay through Room Service and actually completed it. We verify this against our booking records.

1.3 You can't participate if you are an owner, employee, contractor, or agent of the property you're writing about, or an immediate family member of one, unless you disclose it in advance and we agree in writing to publish with that relationship stated on the page.

1.4 Participation is by invitation and at our discretion. We may decline an application or end a correspondent relationship at any time, and we don't have to give a reason.

2 · Assignments

2.1 Everything is commissioned in advance. Before you travel, we'll issue an assignment brief setting out what we're asking for, approximate length, photography, video, sections, deadline, and the honorarium. You accept it or you don't. Declining a brief carries no consequence of any kind.

2.2 Nothing about your trip changes because you've accepted a brief. You book, pay, and travel exactly as you otherwise would. You are a guest of the property, not our representative, and you must not present yourself as press, as a reviewer, or as acting for Room Service while you're there.

2.3 We don't guarantee publication. We may decline to publish a filed entry, publish part of it, hold it, or remove it later. Clause 3.5 covers what happens to your honorarium if we do.

2.4 We edit. We may edit for length, clarity, structure, grammar, and legal risk, and we may use AI tools to assist with that editing. We will not edit your conclusions, your rating, or the substance of your criticism. You'll see and approve the final version before it publishes.

2.5 You may withdraw an entry at any point before publication. After publication, see clause 5.7.

3 · The honorarium

3.1 Amount. Each assignment carries an honorarium set out in the brief and agreed with you in writing before you travel. It varies by assignment and reflects what we're asking of you: length, volume of photography and video, number of properties, difficulty, and turnaround.

3.2 It does not depend on what you write. This is the most important clause in this document. Your honorarium is fixed before you write a word and is not conditioned, expressly or by implication, on your rating, your conclusions, your sentiment, or on the entry being favorable to any property. A critical entry is paid identically to a complimentary one. We will never ask you to change a conclusion, and we will never adjust an agreed honorarium after reading a file.

3.3 Settlement. You choose one of:

• Credit applied against a future booking with Room Service. Credit is valid for 24 months from issue, is non-transferable outside your household, has no cash value, and may be applied to any booking we handle.
• Direct settlement to you.
• Donation in full to one of our nominated organizations. We make the transfer and send you the receipt.

You choose at the point of accepting the brief. Changing afterwards is at our discretion.

3.4 When it's paid. Within 30 days of our acceptance of a complete, compliant filing. If you file materially short of the brief, significantly under length, or without the required photography, we may ask you to complete it or may reduce the honorarium proportionately to the shortfall in volume delivered. That adjustment relates only to quantity of work delivered and never to its content, tone, or conclusions.

3.5 If we don't publish. If you file on brief and we decline to publish for our own editorial reasons, you're paid in full. If we decline because the filing breaches these terms, it isn't your own work, you didn't take the stay, you concealed a relationship with the property, nothing is payable.

3.6 If your trip doesn't happen. Cancelled or unfulfilled stay, no honorarium. The brief lapses and can be reissued for a future trip.

3.7 Tax. The honorarium may be taxable income to you, including where you take it as credit or direct it to a donation. We may need a completed W-9 and may be required to issue a Form 1099 where payments reach the reporting threshold in a calendar year. You're responsible for your own tax position and we're not able to advise on it.

3.8 No employment. You are an independent contributor. This isn't employment, partnership, agency, or a joint venture, and nothing here entitles you to benefits of any kind.

4 · What you promise us

By filing an entry, you confirm that:

4.1 You personally took the stay, on the dates stated, and everything factual in the entry is true to the best of your knowledge.

4.2 The writing is yours and the photographs and video are yours, taken by you or by someone in your party who has agreed to this license.

4.3 The observations, judgements, and opinions are your own and are held in good faith. You have not used generative AI to produce the substance of the entry or to generate, alter, or enhance any image or video. Ordinary phone processing, cropping, and straightening are fine. Generated content is not.

4.4 You've disclosed anything that could reasonably color your account: an existing relationship with the property or its staff, an upgrade or benefit you received beyond what you booked, a prior complaint, a dispute, or a comped element of the stay.

4.5 You have not accepted, and will not accept, payment or benefits from the property or anyone connected with it in exchange for what you write.

4.6 The material doesn't infringe anyone's rights, isn't defamatory, and doesn't breach anyone's privacy or confidence.

4.7 You have consent from any identifiable person appearing in your photographs or video, and none of them are minors other than your own children, for whom you give consent as parent or guardian.

5 · Publication, disclosure, and license

5.1 Every entry is published with a note stating that it was commissioned and that you received an honorarium not contingent on your conclusions. This is required and non-negotiable, and it's the reason anyone trusts the rest of the page.

5.2 You must not post the commissioned material, or any substantially similar version of it, to third-party review platforms. That includes Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Yelp, and any equivalent. Incentivised reviews on those platforms create legal exposure for everyone involved and we're not going near it. Nothing stops you leaving your own uncompensated review of a property anywhere you like, provided it isn't the commissioned material and you don't reference the honorarium.

5.3 No testimonial content. Entries are about the property, not about Room Service. You agree not to include praise, recommendation, or commentary about us in the material, and we will edit out any such content whether it's favorable or critical. Separately, we may invite you to give a client testimonial after your entry has published. Giving or declining one has no bearing on your honorarium or on future assignments, and we won't repurpose text from your entry as testimonial content.

5.4 Attribution. Tell us how you want to be credited: full name, first name, initials, or a pen name we agree together. We'll use exactly that.

5.5 You keep ownership. Copyright in your entry, photographs, and video remains yours. What follows is a license, not an assignment. You grant us an exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use, host, reproduce, publish, display, distribute, excerpt, translate, adapt, edit, and create derivative works from the material, in whole or in part, in any medium. We may use it in the Guest Book and on roomservice.inc, in newsletters, social channels and marketing, in materials shared with clients and partners, and in syndication to third-party publishers and travel partners. We may also process it to build and operate recommendation, search, and conversational features on our platform, attributing or anonymising you consistently with clause 5.4. To the extent permitted by law you waive moral rights in the material, or agree not to enforce them, so we can edit and adapt it as described.

5.6 Exclusivity, and its limits. Exclusivity applies to the entry as filed and edited, for 12 months from publication, after which the license continues on a non-exclusive basis and you're free to republish it yourself with a credit and link. Your photographs and video are yours to use personally throughout. Post them, print them, put them in an album. The exclusivity is about licensing or selling the same imagery commercially to another publisher or to the property.

5.7 After publication. You may ask us to remove an entry, and we'll consider it in good faith and will always remove it where there's a genuine privacy or safety concern. Otherwise the license survives, including for archived and already-distributed copies. We may remove or amend any entry at any time.

5.8 Name and likeness. We may use your agreed byline, and any photograph of you that you supply, in connection with the material and in promoting the Guest Book.

6 · Our commitments to you

Since the rest of this document is about what you owe us, here's the other direction:

• We will never change an agreed honorarium after reading what you filed.
• We will never ask you to soften a conclusion, and we will not accept edits from a property.
• We will not share your draft with a hotel before publication.
• We will show you the final edit and won't publish without your approval.
• We will not use your name in a way you haven't agreed to.
• No property will ever pay to appear in the Guest Book, and if that changes we'll label it unmissably.

7 · The rest

7.1 Changes. We may update these terms. Material changes will be notified to active correspondents, and the terms attached to your brief are the ones that govern that assignment.

7.2 Ending it. Either of us can stop at any time. Clauses 4, 5, 7.3, and 7.4 survive.

7.3 Indemnity. You'll indemnify us against claims arising from a breach of your promises in section 4, but only to the extent the claim arises from something you actually said or did, and not from our own editing, framing, or use of the material.

7.4 Governing law. Colorado, and the courts of Denver County, consistent with our main site terms.

7.5 These terms, together with your assignment brief, are the whole agreement about the program. Where they conflict, the brief governs for that assignment.

Questions: correspondents@roomservice.inc. See also our standards.