Content rules
What may not be written or shown here, and what happens when somebody reports it.
This is the short version of what may not be written, shown or offered on GuidesUnited. It applies to everybody: travellers writing reviews, guides writing listings, and both of them writing to each other.
What is not allowed
Threats, harassment or abuse aimed at anyone. Attacks on people for who they are: their origin, religion, gender, sexuality, disability or age. Sexual content, and anything at all that sexualises a child. Encouraging violence or self-harm. Promoting illegal activity, including a tour built around something that is illegal where it happens.
Less obvious, and also not allowed: somebody else's private information, published without their agreement. Pretending to be another person, or a business you do not run. Advertising something that is not the tour. Sending the same message to many people.
Reviews
A review can only come from a booking you completed, which the platform enforces rather than asks. Beyond that: write about the tour and the guide, not about anybody's appearance or private life, and leave contact details out of it.
We do not remove a review for being negative, and we do not remove one because the guide disagrees with it. Guides can reply to any review in public, and the reply stays under it.
Messages
Messages between a traveller and a guide are private, and nobody here reads them unless one of the two people in them reports the conversation. What we ask is that they stay about the tour, and that nobody uses them to move the booking off the platform, ask for payment another way, or collect contact details.
Reporting something
Every conversation has a report link beside the other person's name, and every review has one underneath it. Reporting a conversation locks it immediately: neither of you can write in it while a moderator reads it, and everything already written stays there.
A reported review stays published while we read it, and that is deliberate. A review that disappears the moment somebody objects to it is a review nobody can trust.
What happens next
A moderator reads every report and decides: that nothing is wrong, that a warning is enough, that what was written comes down, or that an account closes. We tell the person concerned what we decided.
If you think we got it wrong, write to us through the contact page and say so. A person reads that too.