We Value Your Trust

We’ve created a community where members can share their reviews to help others plan perfect pet friendly trips. We know you rely on that information, and your trust is paramount to what we do.

Once in a while, someone will try to undermine the system by attempting to post a fake review. So we’re sharing our approach, policies, and the actions we take to identify, block, and remove fraudulent reviews. Here’s what we believe:

We believe the best pet friendly advice comes from other pet lovers.

At GoPetFriendly, our members can share reviews of their experiences at pet friendly hotels, vacation properties, campgrounds, restaurants, and attractions.

We believe in your right to voice your opinion.

The GoPetFriendly community has a wealth of valuable experience, and every one of our users should feel confident sharing their opinions. When you stay in a hotel or eat in a restaurant with your pet, you have a fundamental right to talk about that experience with others. We are immensely proud of the community we’ve built that helps our users do just that.

We believe all experiences count, not just the ones where you paid the bill. If you have a party of four at a restaurant, we believe every one of those people has the right to share their thoughts.

Because we believe in promoting personal experiences, we do not take lightly the decision to remove a review from our site. It might be easier to give in to censorship and remove reviews that a business owner disagrees with. But it goes against what we stand for, which is the right for genuine consumers to share their experiences.

In keeping with this philosophy, while we do require reviewers to certify that they are reviewing their own experiences before they can submit their review to GoPetFriendly, we don’t seek third-party verification.

We believe in fairness. Businesses are not able to influence us to improve their reviews or ratings.

We have unique processes for moderating the reviews submitted to GoPetFriendly. Those processes are applied consistently to all content and properties. We never have and never will give our advertisers or anyone else preferential treatment.

We believe that businesses who don’t play by the rules should be penalized.

Businesses know that consumers rely heavily on reviews when making travel decisions. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous businesses will try to cheat in order to attract more customers. We define “cheating” as positively reviewing their own business (or finding others to do so on their behalf) or negatively reviewing their competitors.

These activities constitute fraud. Posting fake reviews violates the GoPetFriendly Terms of Use, as well as unfair competition and/or consumer protection laws in many countries. We invest significant time, effort, and money into identifying and blocking fraudulent activity on our site.

 

Our Processes to Identify and Block Fraud

• We have experience identifying normal reviews and review behavior on our platform. We also recognize patterns of fraudulent activity.
• We capture and record numerous sample reviews every day and a human being assesses them to identify, block and remove fraud.
• Once reviews are published, we allow business owners and community members to flag content for our review if they believe it is fraudulent. All reports from our community and owners are reviewed and analyzed by our team.
• We proactively engage with companies trying to hire people to write reviews as well as property owners attempting to buy fake reviews in order to catch those that try to circumvent our systems.

 

How We Penalize Businesses Engaging In Fraudulent Activity

• We block or remove the fake reviews.
• Businesses with upgraded listings that engage in fraud violate the terms of our agreement and will be immediately removed from preferential placement on the site.
• We aggressively pursue companies that offer to boost a business’ reputation by writing fake reviews on its behalf. When we catch them, we remove all of the fake reviews they’ve posted, and we penalize their clients.

 

Why Don’t We Simply Remove Listing From the Site?

You might be surprised to learn that GoPetFriendly doesn’t simply remove the listing on our site for businesses caught engaging in review fraud. The reason is, that’s exactly what some of these businesses want us to do! They’re hoping to prevent pet owners from researching and commenting on the quality of their facilities and services. But we believe our community has the right to know what other GoPetFriendly users are saying.