How reviews work
The reviews on this site do not come from a form anyone can fill in. They are written by drivers who actually left a car on the lot and came back for it, and each of them gets one invitation by email once the stay is over. Below is exactly who can write a review, when we ask for it, what gets scored and what the car park operator can do about it afterwards. No rounding, and no claims about things we do not do.
Who writes the reviews
Only a driver whose booking is finished can write a review, meaning the car went in and came back out. There is no public form. You cannot rate a car park you never used, and you cannot rate a booking that was cancelled or one that is still running.
One booking gets one review. Once it is sent it cannot be edited and a second one about the same stay cannot be written. Two stays at the same lot are two separate reviews and they count as two.
Under each review you see a first name and one initial, captured at the moment it was sent. Editing your account later does not rewrite the signature on a published review.
When we ask for a score
The invitation goes out once, by email, about a day after you drive off the lot. One message per booking, no reminders. If more than thirty days have passed since departure we do not send it at all, because a score for a stay two months back says less than it appears to.
The link in that email opens the form directly and works for about two months. It needs no login, because the link itself is the key, and it exposes nothing from the booking beyond the dates of the stay and the name of the car park. Once it expires the form stops accepting an answer.
We send no invitation when the booking carries no driver email address. A booking like that can be entered over the phone by the car park's own staff, and then there is simply nowhere to send the request.
What the driver scores
Drivers score one to five in four categories: getting to the lot, the standard of the lot and its staff, the transfer to the terminal, and how clear the entry instructions were. The overall score is derived from those, never stored separately, so it cannot drift away from the breakdown you see.
We only ask about the transfer on lots that actually run one. If a car park does not drive you to the terminal that category is not collected and the breakdown says it does not apply. We ask about the instructions everywhere, on every lot, because the driver had to get in somehow, including where no instructions were waiting.
The comment is optional. A review with stars and no text still counts towards the car park's average, but it does not appear in the list, because there is nothing to show. A car park with no reviews at all is not scored zero, it is simply described as new here.
What the car park operator can do
The operator sees every review of their own lots and can answer any of them in public. The answer appears under the review, marked as the car park's reply, and the author gets one email about it.
The operator can also report a review for us to look at, if they believe it breaks the rules. A report does not take the review off the page and does not pull it out of the average. A reported review stays exactly where it was and carries exactly the same weight.
The operator cannot hide a review, delete it, or change a single star in it. There is no button for that, no procedure for it, and it makes no difference how low the score is.
Who takes a review down, and why
Only the platform, meaning us, can hide a review, and only with a recorded reason. We do it when the text attacks a named person, exposes somebody's personal data, is obvious spam, or has nothing to do with a stay at the car park. A low score is not a reason.
A hidden review leaves the page and the average. The decision can be reversed, because a mistake in that direction is possible too, and the review then returns to its place with its score intact.
What we deliberately skip
We do not fade reviews out over time. A review from last year weighs the same in the average as one from last week, and it does not disappear after some number of months. We would rather say that plainly than write a freshness rule nobody would feel at our current volume.
We do not buy reviews, commission them, or ask anyone to leave a score in exchange for anything. We do not sort the list so the good ones float up, and we do not tuck the bad ones behind a button.
We do not publish a count of blocked reports, because today we cannot count it honestly. When we can, this page will say so.