The Knot Worldwide Inc. Review Policy

Our Mission

The Knot Worldwide is committed to hosting review platforms where a true representation of the client's experience with wedding professionals can be shared.

Responsibility of Review Content

The reviewer is responsible for the content they have posted.

The Knot Worldwide does not act as a publisher and has not "published" the content posted by users. Under Section 230 of the Computer Decency Act ("CDA"), The Knot Worldwide acts as an "interactive computer service". The CDA provides in part, "No provider of user an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" The CDA further states no cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."

An "interactive computer service" means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server. The Knot Worldwide clearly falls within the interactive computer service definition and is specifically the type of entity that Congress protected under the CDA.

Guidelines and Overviews

Our reviews platforms are designed to encourage honest opinions about the events leading up to, surrounding, and after a wedding in order to represent the wedding professional's interactions with their clients. Reviewers can leave their opinions however the review must remain free of accusations, assumptions, and hearsay. We also require that statements of fact must be accurate. Reviewers are required to have an actual first-hand wedding-event related experience to share.

All reviews and review replies give wedding professionals an opportunity to showcase their professionalism and empathy.

Clients are defined as the individual who pays for the services but also includes the couple getting married as long as their names are on the contract. The wedding event that the client is reviewing must have taken place within the last four years. Regardless if services are terminated prior to the event date, if business interactions took place, then that client will still be permitted to post a review. The client experience begins with the first contact and we recognize that the services they may or may not provide on the day of the event are only a portion of a client's overall interaction with a wedding professional . That is also why a review is allowed at any point before or after the wedding has taken place.

Employees of a wedding professional, other wedding professionals at an event, competitors of a business, etc. are not eligible to leave a review on our site(s) unless they are reviewing their personal wedding and used the professional’s services.

All feedback is allowed regardless if it is negative, positive, or neutral.

Qualifying for our awards

The Knot Worldwide awards The Knot's Best of Weddings and WeddingWire's Couples' Choice Awards annually to recognize the top wedding professionals across the United States. These honors represent the highest rated vendors on each site.

In order to be eligible for these awards, you must receive a minimum of seven reviews on each site with an average rating of 4.5+ in a calendar year. Meeting the minimum criteria does not guarantee you will win an award. Reviews cannot be transferred or combined to meet the minimum criteria. To be considered valid, the review must be left by someone who has conducted business with a Vendor for a wedding related event. Should a review be in dispute at the time winners are being determined, such Vendor may be eligible for reconsideration at the sole discretion of the WeddingPro Policy Team.

Should the Policy Team find a Vendor is not acting in the spirit of the awards, their eligibility to win may be suspended either temporarily or permanently. Measures that may result in disqualification may include but are not limited to:

  1. Attempting to restrict in any way a Member’s right to post a review, by contract or otherwise, including without limitation, using non-disparagement clauses in contracts
  2. Offering a Member cash or other compensation or thing of value in any form in exchange for a more favorable review
  3. Attempting to post and/or cut and paste and/or copy the content of a Member’s feedback review from the Services to your own personal or business site, to any other third party website and/or to or on any of your own personal, business or third-party marketing/advertising materials, regardless of the form
  4. Attempting to post and/or cut and paste and/or copy the content of a Member’s feedback review from your own personal or business site, any other third party website and/or any communication with the Client regardless of the form to our sites
  5. Attempt to gain feedback by receiving multiple feedback from the same Client
  6. Post or attempt to post, in any manner or by any means, a feedback review on your own account; or
  7. Misrepresent or impersonate another Member

Photos with reviews

The Knot and WeddingWire allow reviewers to add photos within their reviews. They must adhere to these specifications:

  1. Collages must not exceed 2 images.
  2. Minimum sizing of 300px wide by 300px high
  3. Must be in good quality
  4. Must clearly depict the service rendered
  5. Must apply to the content and category of the review
  6. Nothing crude, vulgar, profane, or violating our Terms of Use
  7. Cannot contain copyrighted or trademarked materials from other parties without consent
  8. Is not a contract, paperwork, email, message, or text-based content.

The Knot Worldwide reserves the right to remove any photos that:

  1. Use a persons' image or likeness without consent.
  2. If the copyright owner of the image does not wish them to be displayed within a review.
  3. Reasons listed above or any other reason at our discretion

Photos will not be reviewed for relevancy as long as we can determine that the services rendered or the content of the review is depicted in the image. We define the quality of photos as a reasonable individual can determine the service provided by that Wedding Pro through such photos.

While you may request a review of the images attached to a review it is separate from the process of disputing a review. Those details are outlined below in the Dispute section.

Responding to Reviews

We recommend that pros respond to every review that they receive—good or bad! Responses let couples see how you interact with your past clients and give them a better understanding of what it is like to work with you.

Remember, not everyone will experience a situation in the same way and responses allow you to share your perspective. But before you respond, take a moment to review the following:

  1. People who read reviews are looking to hear about all experiences, not just the good ones. It is just as important, if not more important, for potential clients to see how you handle a situation where things didn’t work out as expected.
  2. Do not convince yourself that one client's poor experience will negate every positive review on our site(s). After all, reviews at or under 4-stars
  3. If you start to recognize similar themes across multiple reviews, good or bad, this is a great indication of what couples are loving or what could use a little work. Use the positive themes as a way to identify your differentiator from competition, and the not-so-great themes as an area to put a little extra focus.
  4. If you do receive a bad review, take some time to process before responding. It may be tempting to respond right away, but we often see that emotionally driven responses have an adverse affect on what you are trying to achieve.
  5. Once you’ve given yourself at least 48 hours to process, take a step back to reflect on the feedback. When drafting your response, make sure to put yourself in the shoes of a potential client reading your response and how it will read. Make sure to thank the reviewer for taking the time to share their feedback and have an unbiased party read your response before publishing.

Please note: When responding to a review, please note that many of the same policies that apply to our reviewers apply to you as well. We do not allow the use of reviewer’s personal/private information, nor do we allow profane, vulgar, racist statements or adult material. Any response that does not comply with our policies is subject to removal. In the instance of a removal by the Policy team, we will inform you of any review response that we removed and the justification.

Disputes

Our Policy team is a neutral third party between our reviewers and our wedding professionals. This team audits all review inquiries as a group. Based on these guidelines, the team determines which reviews should be edited, remain on the site(s) as they are, or removed. The outcome of all dispute inquiries are determined by our Policy team based on our Terms of Use

Our Policy team will not determine who is right or who is wrong but rather moderate each situation individually. We maintain a review platform that is unbiased and keeps the integrity of each review. The Knot Worldwide reserves the right to keep or remove any content from our site(s).

To dispute a review, please follow the steps below:

On The Knot : Log in to your WeddingPro dashboard and click into “The Knot.” From there, click on the Reviews tab. Under “My Reviews,” scroll to the review that you would like to dispute and click "Dispute." You will be required to provide a dispute reason.

On WeddingWire : Log in to your WeddingPro dashboard and click into “WeddingWire.” Click on the "Reviews" tab then "Reviews" in the left navigation. Scroll down to the review in question and click "Dispute" under the review content. Please provide a reason for why you are disputing the review. Note an automatic email is sent to the reviewer upon submitting a dispute. Then confirm your submission.

Our Policy team will accept disputes on the basis of the below reasons:

  • Contains profane, vulgar, racist statement or adult material
  • Contains a last name, date of birth, address (outside of the business)
  • Is for a non-wedding related event
  • Is factually inaccurate (backed by documentation)
  • Written by someone that didn’t conduct business with you.
  • Is a duplicate review

Invalid dispute reasons include examples such as:

  • Wrong wedding dates. This doesn't change the content of the review and we don’t require reviewers to update their wedding dates in the system as they change.
  • Reviews written over 12 months ago. We don’t expect the wedding pro or the reviewer to retain documentation beyond that timeframe.
  • A difference of opinion. No one's opinion is right or wrong so we won’t discuss those during a dispute.
  • A review that has already been reviewed. You may only dispute a review one time. Once the Policy team has closed the case, the review is no longer disputable.

Once you have disputed the review our Policy team will begin to investigate the claims. Please note, that we have sole discretion whether or not the reviews flagged will be further investigated or not. We require written documentation to do a complete review of the claims. Statements of opinion are not open to dispute.

If we reach out to a reviewer for documentation or to request edits, they have 7 days from initial contact from our Policy team to respond in order to ensure timeliness of the dispute process.