Lay My Hat

I'm reading booking.com terms and conditions and can't believe my eyes: they say that guest reviews is "their (booking.com) intellectual property" .
To my mind, a review about me and my property is mine too because it relates to me personally. How do you think

Actually, I believe that it should belong to the author.

But whenever you write something on t'internet anywhere, you'll find you tick some T&C somewhere in order to submit your work of art, and guess whats buried on page 329 of that T&C ? So when you click Submit, you give away your life.

but if you are a property owner, may you use all reviews , say left on booking.com, about you/your property on your website?

If that's what it says on page 287 of the T&C then I believe you.

Podobovenko wrote:but if you are a property owner, may you use all reviews , say left on booking.com, about you/your property on your website?

Almost certainly not. The original website that the review was left on is the publisher. (Similar situation to book author and publisher)

To be honest we could not care less who the few words belong to.
How does this affect your rental?
If it matters so much to you have you checked to see what all the other portals say on this matter? It could well be the same for every review written.

casasantoestevo wrote: How does this affect your rental?

I would imagine it is a question asked by those who want to divorce themselves from big listing sites that they may have been with for years and through whom they have collected reviews, when they want to strike out on their own or simply drop that one particular site

It is a shame that they will then lose those reviews into a black hole when they probably want to cut and paste them into their own website.

I agree that it is more than likely the original site owns the words but I wonder if anyone is going to come after you if you 'borrow' them. Does Trip Advisor come after newspapers who use their reviews as illustrations in articles? Does it come after all the Twitter users quoting a particularly newsworthy review? More often than not the publicity is bad in these cases, but I doubt they pursue. Are they searching private sites for matching word sequences in google? I doubt it.

casasantoestevo wrote: How does this affect your rental?

If you are new to ths business, you put your listing on booking.com or other sites. When you earn enough, you make own website, but until then you get tens of reviews. After you launch your site it looks ok but reviews could raise conversion significantly. Meanwhile booking.com boasts it's OWN millions of reviews which raises trust to booking, not to you.

That is my opinion

Podobovenko wrote:

casasantoestevo wrote: How does this affect your rental?

If you are new to ths business, you put your listing on booking.com or other sites. When you earn enough, you make own website, but until then you get tens of reviews. After you launch your site it looks ok but reviews could raise conversion significantly. Meanwhile booking.com boasts it's OWN millions of reviews which raises trust to booking, not to you.

That is my opinion

I agree.
But whatever the small print says would still publish on my own website if I felt it was beneficial. They might have decided that they own the words, but you still own the property to which those words relate.

Podobovenko wrote:

casasantoestevo wrote: How does this affect your rental?

If you are new to ths business, you put your listing on booking.com or other sites. When you earn enough, you make own website, but until then you get tens of reviews. After you launch your site it looks ok but reviews could raise conversion significantly. Meanwhile booking.com boasts it's OWN millions of reviews which raises trust to booking, not to you.

That is my opinion

If you do not like the rules there is no one making you list with any portal.
Just look for one which is suitable. There are a lot out there.
In your quotation of my post you seemed to have missed off the second question. That was:
If it matters so much to you have you checked to see what all the other portals say on this matter?
I will now add another question: In your research what are your findings?

casasantoestevo wrote: If it matters so much to you have you checked to see what all the other portals say on this matter?
I will now add another question: In your research what are your findings?

I checked booking.com, tripadvisor, airbnb and local ukrainian site. Looks like airbnb is the most tolerant.

I'm trying to get a proffesional answer from an intellectual property lawyer or something like that

Podobovenko wrote: If you are new to ths business, you put your listing on booking.com or other sites. When you earn enough, you make own website, but until then you get tens of reviews. After you launch your site it looks ok but reviews could raise conversion significantly. Meanwhile booking.com boasts it's OWN millions of reviews which raises trust to booking, not to you.

A comment and a suggestion:
The biggest obstacle to getting people to book or enquire through your own web site is getting them to see your web site in the first place. Booking.com etc will always be much more visible through search engines than your own page but not only that, guests generally prefer to search on a listing site as they can search on criteria such as availability and features. As an owner, I hate the listing sites personally, but I use them to find accommodation for our holidays (though I do try to find the owner's site too, when I've made the choice).

Now a suggestion for your web site assuming that you get some people seeing it: Instead of relying on reviews (which nobody would believe as they are on your site, leave a "visitors' book" in the property and show photos of the pages on your web site. As these are handwritten by lots of different people, it is obviously genuine.

You are really wasting your time (maybe money too) with this quest. Now you have to ask which law does it ally to? Booking is an American company with it's base in Amsterdam.
There is far more important things to do for your business and in life too.
For instance; you have stated that you need a website plus you would be far better picking a portal which is suited to your business needs and forget about small things like this.

If you copy a review for your house from booking.com or anywhere else, and they find out, you could say that the renter submitted that review to your site, and as it says in your site's terms and conditions, you are not responsible for third-party opinions expressed, etc...

Good thinking there Batman.