Review Policy

Reviews on Coral Playground are written by divers about dive sites, dive centres and liveaboards. This page explains how we collect them, what “verified” means, how we moderate them and how operators can respond.

1. Who can write a review

• Any signed-in diver can review a dive site, dive centre or liveaboard, whether or not they booked through Coral Playground.
• After a liveaboard trip booked through Coral Playground has finished, we email the diver an invitation to review it. Every completed liveaboard booking gets the invitation, whatever the experience was like; we do not choose who to ask based on whether we expect a good or bad review. We do not currently send invitations for other kinds of booking.
• One review per person per listing. You can edit yours at any time; edits are moderated again.
• Businesses cannot review a dive centre or liveaboard they manage on Coral Playground. They can reply instead (see section 5).
• To limit spam, each account can write or edit up to 5 reviews in any 24 hours. Our forms may also ask you to complete a short automated bot check.

2. What “Verified booking” means

A review carries the Verified booking badge when our system matched it to a completed booking made by the same account through Coral Playground: a liveaboard trip on that boat, a course at that dive centre, or a liveaboard trip whose itinerary visited that dive site. The check runs on our servers when the review is saved; reviewers and operators cannot set the badge themselves. Once a review is verified it stays verified when the author edits it. Reviews without the badge are labelled as not verified.

3. No incentives

We never pay for reviews, and we never offer discounts, gifts or other rewards in exchange for writing one or for writing a positive one. Operators may not offer incentives for reviews either. Reviews we believe were incentivised are removed.

4. Moderation

Every new or edited review waits for our team to approve it before it appears. That includes edits to a published review (which comes down until the new version is approved) and edits to a review we rejected, which goes back into the queue for a fresh look. Positive and negative reviews go through exactly the same checks, and we publish negative reviews. We reject a review only if it:

• is spam, advertising, or contains links or contact details;
• contains hate speech, harassment, threats or obscene content;
• contains personal data about someone else (full names of staff or guests, phone numbers);
• was written with a conflict of interest, for example by the operator, its staff or a competitor;
• is not about the diving experience itself, or is clearly about a different business;
• is fake, copied, or written for someone else.

Every rejection is recorded with its reason. We do not edit the text of reviews. Reviews are shown newest first by default, and visitors can also sort by highest or lowest rating.

5. Operator replies

The business that manages the dive centre or liveaboard being reviewed can post one public reply to each review, and can update it later. The first reply from each operator account is checked by our team before it appears; once one of that account's replies has been approved, its later replies appear straight away. Operators cannot edit, hide or delete reviews, and replies do not change a review's rating. Dive sites have no operator, so dive site reviews do not have replies.

6. Reporting a review

If you think a review breaks these rules, sign in and use the Report link under it. Each person can report a review once. Our team looks at every report and either keeps the review or removes it under the rules above. Reporting does not hide a review automatically.

7. Ratings

The Coral Playground rating on a listing is the average of its published reviews on Coral Playground only. Ratings from other websites are shown separately with their source and are never mixed into ours.

8. Contact

Questions about a review or this policy: support@coralplayground.com.