Review policy

What a review on lhfs.uk is

lhfs.uk asks one main question about each place: how friendly were the staff? A review is a 1–5 friendliness rating, with optional 1–5 ratings for helpfulness, speed of service and cleanliness, a title, a short account of your visit, a display name, and (optionally) the month of your visit and the kind of trip you were on.

Every outlet has its own page and its own reviews — the WHSmith in the Terminal 3 arrivals hall is reviewed separately from the WHSmith by gate 33 — because the staff are different. Please review the outlet you actually used.

Fake reviews are banned

A review must be based on your own, genuine, first-hand experience of that place. We do not accept, and will remove, any review that:

• is written by the owner, a manager, an employee, a relative or friend of staff, a supplier or a competitor of the business, or anyone else with a connection to it;
• is about a place the reviewer has not visited, or a visit by someone else;
• has been bought, commissioned or written on someone else’s behalf, or generated or copied so that it does not reflect the reviewer’s own experience;
• is one of several reviews of the same place by the same person, or is part of a co-ordinated campaign to push a score up or down.

Incentivised reviews

We do not allow incentivised reviews at all. We never offer money, discounts, vouchers, prize draws, gifts, upgrades or anything else for a review, and we don’t publish reviews written in return for anything. Businesses must not offer their customers anything in return for a review on lhfs.uk, must not make an offer conditional on a positive review, and must not ask their staff to write reviews. If a business offers you something for a review, please tell us.

A review is not a complaint

Reviews are public and are for other travellers. We are not the business and can’t resolve problems with it, so please contact the business directly about refunds, lost items or complaints. You can still leave a review whether or not your problem was sorted out.

How reviews are collected and checked

• Only through our form. Reviews are submitted on each place’s page. We don’t import, copy or buy reviews from other websites, and we did not add any reviews ourselves: every place started with zero.
• A declaration. Every reviewer confirms that the review is their own genuine experience, that they have not been paid or offered anything for it, and that they have no connection with the business or its competitors.
• Automatic checks before anything is accepted: reviews containing web links, email addresses or phone numbers, strong swearing or slurs are sent back to the reviewer to change; repeated text, a second review of the same place from the same connection within 30 days, and very frequent submissions are blocked; unusual patterns (for example a burst of reviews, all-capitals text, or wording that suggests an incentive) are flagged for the moderator. To do this we keep a scrambled (hashed) version of the reviewer’s IP address for 30 days — see our privacy notice.
• A person checks every review before it is published. Nothing appears on the site until a moderator has approved it. We aim to check new reviews within three days. Reviews waiting to be checked are not shown and do not count towards any score.
• The same checks for every review. We apply exactly the same rules to positive and negative reviews, whatever the rating, and whoever the business is.

Why a review might not be published, or might be removed

We approve every genuine, relevant and lawful review. We will reject or remove a review only if:

• we have good reason to think it is not a genuine first-hand experience, is incentivised, or was written by someone connected with the business or a competitor;
• it is spam, advertising, or contains links;
• it is abusive, threatening, hateful or discriminatory;
• it contains personal information we cannot simply remove (see below), or allegations of a crime;
• it is about something other than the place (for example, the airline, the weather or a different outlet), or duplicates another review;
• the reviewer asks us to remove it.

We never reject, hide, delay or remove a review because it is negative, has a low rating, or because the business objects to it.

We don’t edit reviews

We never change a reviewer’s words or ratings, with one exception: we may remove personal information — such as a staff member’s full name, or someone’s contact details — to protect people’s privacy. When we do, we replace the details with “[removed]” and the review carries a note saying it was edited by lhfs.uk to remove personal information. We never change the meaning of a review or its rating. If personal information can’t be removed without changing the meaning, we reject the review instead.

Businesses and lhfs.uk

• Listing on lhfs.uk is free and is not something businesses can buy. There are no business accounts.
• No business can pay us, or offer us anything, to publish, remove, hide, delay or reorder reviews, or to change a score or its position in any list.
• Businesses can report a review using the “Report this review” link, like anyone else. We look at the evidence, but we won’t remove a genuine review just because it is critical.
• Replies shown under a review as “Reply from lhfs.uk” are written by us (for example, to explain that a listing has been corrected). They are not replies from the business, and they never change the review or its score.
• Some links on the site are affiliate links, marked “Ad” where they appear: if you book or buy through one, we earn a commission. This never affects whether a review is published, any score, or the order in which places appear. See our affiliate disclosure.

How scores are calculated

• A place’s friendliness score is the plain average (mean) of the 1–5 friendliness ratings in all of its approved reviews, shown to one decimal place. There is no weighting, and older reviews count the same as newer ones.
• The helpfulness, speed and cleanliness scores are worked out the same way, from the reviews that included them.
• A score is only shown once a place has at least 3 approved reviews — until then the page says “Not enough reviews yet”. The same threshold applies to every place, and approved reviews are always shown, even before the threshold is reached. The number of reviews is always shown next to a score.
• Leaderboards (“Friendliest spots”) only include places that have reached the threshold. They are ordered by friendliness score, then by number of approved reviews, then by name. Nothing else affects the order.
• Reviews that are waiting to be checked, rejected or removed never count. When a review is approved or removed, the score is recalculated immediately.
• Reviews are listed newest first. We don’t reorder them to show positive or negative reviews more prominently.

Reporting a review

Every review has a Report this review link. Anyone can use it — travellers, businesses and anyone else. Tell us what is wrong (for example that you think it is fake, contains personal information, or is about a different place). A moderator looks at each report, normally within three days, and either keeps the review, removes personal information from it, or removes it. While we investigate a serious report we may take the review off the site temporarily; it then doesn’t count towards the score until a decision is made.

What we do about fake reviews

• We remove fake, incentivised and connected reviews as soon as we find them and recalculate scores straight away.
• We can stop further reviews and reports from the same connection.
• If a business appears to have arranged fake reviews, we may pause reviews for it, remove reviews that benefited it, and show a notice on its page explaining why.
• We may report systematic or serious cases to the Competition and Markets Authority or Trading Standards.
• We keep rejected reviews for up to 365 days so that we can spot repeat patterns, then delete them.

Changing or removing your own review

Email hello@lhfs.uk with the place, the title of your review, your display name and roughly when you sent it. Because we don’t keep reviewers’ contact details, we may ask a question or two to make sure the request is genuine. We’ll remove it, or you can send a new review and we’ll remove the old one.

The rules we follow

Since 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Schedule 20, paragraph 13) bans fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and publishing reviews or review scores in a misleading way, and requires anyone who publishes consumer reviews to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove them. This policy is based on the Competition and Markets Authority’s guidance: Fake reviews (CMA208), its short guide for businesses publishing consumer reviews and its guidance for online review sites.

We review this policy, and whether our checks are working, at least once a year and whenever we change how reviews work.