Review and comment policy

Reviews and comments

Each festival page has two places to have your say:

• Reviews are for people who have been. A review is a 1–5 overall rating, with optional 1–5 ratings for the food and drink, value for money and organisation (queues, seating, toilets, parking), a title, an account of your visit, a display name, the year you went and, if you like, who you went with. Reviews open once a festival has taken place at least once.
• Comments are for everyone: questions (“Is it dog-friendly?”), tips (“Arrive before 11 to beat the queues”) and plans. Comments don’t have ratings and never affect a festival’s score.

Fake reviews are banned

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

• is written by an organiser, a member of their team, a sponsor, a trader, exhibitor or performer at the festival, a relative or friend of any of them, or a competing festival or business, or by anyone else with a connection to it;
• is about a festival the reviewer did not attend, or someone else’s visit;
• 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 festival year by the same person, or part of a co-ordinated campaign to push a rating up or down.

Incentivised reviews

We do not allow incentivised reviews at all. We never offer money, free tickets, discounts, vouchers, prize draws, gifts or anything else for a review, and we don’t publish reviews written in return for anything. Organisers and traders must not offer visitors anything in return for a review on Food Feastivals, must not make an offer conditional on a positive review, and must not ask staff, volunteers or traders to write reviews. If someone offers you something for a review, please tell us.

Photos with reviews

You can add up to 4 photos to a review — the food, the stalls, the site. Every photo is checked by a person before it appears, separately from the review text, and is shown with the review credited to your display name (for example “Photo: Sam, visitor, 2026”). We may also add a photo to the festival’s own gallery, with the same credit.

When you send photos you confirm that you took them yourself at that festival, that they don’t show anyone’s face close up or other identifiable people, or personal details such as tickets, screens or number plates, and that you give Food Feastivals permission to show them on this site. We reject photos that show identifiable people, show personal details, aren’t of the festival or aren’t the reviewer’s own, or are offensive or too unclear to help anyone. Location data (GPS) and other hidden information are removed from every photo when it is uploaded. Rejecting a photo doesn’t affect the review, and a photo never changes a rating.

A review is not a complaint

Reviews are public and are for other visitors. We don’t run any festival and can’t resolve problems with tickets, refunds or traders, so please contact the organiser directly. You can still leave a review whether or not your problem was sorted out.

How reviews and comments are collected and checked

• Only through our forms. Reviews and comments are posted on each festival’s page. We don’t import, copy or buy reviews from other websites, and we did not add any ourselves: every festival started with no reviews.
• 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 are not connected with the festival. Everyone who comments agrees to the house rules below.
• Automatic checks before anything is accepted: posts containing web links, email addresses or phone numbers, strong swearing or slurs are sent back to be changed; repeated text, a second review of the same festival from the same connection within 30 days, and very frequent posting are blocked; unusual patterns (for example a burst of reviews, all-capitals text, or wording that suggests a connection or an incentive) are flagged for the moderator. To do this we keep a scrambled (hashed) version of the IP address for 30 days — see our privacy notice.
• A person checks every review and comment before it is published. Nothing appears on the site until a moderator has approved it. We aim to check new posts within three days. Reviews waiting to be checked are not shown and don’t count towards any rating.
• The same checks for everyone. We apply exactly the same rules to positive and negative reviews, whatever the rating and whichever the festival.

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

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

• we have good reason to think it is not genuine, is incentivised, or was written by someone connected with the festival without saying so (for comments) or at all (for reviews);
• it is spam or 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 festival, or duplicates another post;
• the person who wrote it asks us to remove it.

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

House rules for comments

• Keep it about the festival — questions, tips, experiences and plans are all welcome.
• Be kind. No abuse, harassment, discrimination or personal attacks, on visitors, traders or organisers.
• No adverts, links, or selling — including pitches for stalls or tickets.
• No personal details: don’t post phone numbers, emails or addresses, or name private individuals.
• If you’re connected with the festival (an organiser, trader, volunteer or performer), you’re welcome to answer questions — just say who you are. Connected people can’t leave reviews.

We don’t edit what you write

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

Organisers, traders and Food Feastivals

• Listing a festival is free and can’t be bought or boosted. There are no organiser accounts and no paid placements.
• No festival, organiser or trader can pay us, or offer us anything, to publish, remove, hide, delay or reorder reviews or comments, or to change a rating or its position in any list.
• Organisers can report a review using “Report this review”, like anyone else, and can send corrections to a listing through our suggestion form. We look at the evidence, but we won’t remove a genuine review just because it is critical.
• Replies shown as “Reply from Food Feastivals” are written by us (for example, to say a listing has been corrected). They are not replies from the festival, and they never change a review or its rating.
• Some links are affiliate links, marked “Ad” where they appear: if you book through one, we may earn a commission. This never affects which festivals we list, whether a post is published, any rating, or the order in which festivals appear. See our affiliate disclosure.

How ratings are calculated

• A festival’s rating is the plain average (mean) of the 1–5 overall ratings in all its approved reviews, from every year, shown to one decimal place. There is no weighting, and older reviews count the same as newer ones.
• The food and drink, value and organisation ratings are worked out the same way, from the reviews that included them.
• A rating is only shown once a festival has at least 3 approved reviews. The same threshold applies to every festival, and approved reviews are always shown, even before the threshold is reached. The number of reviews is always shown next to a rating.
• The best-rated list only includes festivals that have reached the threshold, ordered by rating, then by number of approved reviews, then by name. Nothing else affects the order. Diary pages list festivals by date, then name.
• Reviews that are waiting to be checked, rejected or removed never count. When a review is approved or removed, the rating is recalculated immediately.
• Reviews are listed newest first, and comments oldest first (so conversations read in order). We don’t reorder them to show positive or negative posts more prominently.

Reporting a post

Every review and comment has a Report link. Anyone can use it — visitors, organisers, traders and anyone else. A moderator looks at each report, normally within three days, and either keeps the post, removes personal information from it, or removes it. While we investigate a serious report we may take a review off the site temporarily; it then doesn’t count towards the rating 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 ratings straight away.
• We can stop further posts and reports from the same connection.
• If a festival 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 and comments for up to 365 days so that we can spot repeat patterns, then delete them.

Changing or removing your own post

Email hello@foodfeastivals.co.uk with the festival, your display name, and roughly when you posted (and the title, for a review). Because we don’t keep contact details, we may ask a question or two to make sure the request is genuine.

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.