How Reviews Work

Reviews are at the heart of trust on DomusVesta. They are how households share honest experiences, and how good providers build a reputation that speaks for itself. This guide explains exactly how reviews work, what goes into one, and why the system is designed to protect both households and providers.

The single most important rule is this: a review can only be left by a household after a booking has been completed. There is no way to post a review without having actually booked and completed work with that provider. Because of this, every review on DomusVesta reflects a real, completed job, not an anonymous opinion or a passing comment.

Who can leave a review, and when

You can leave a review only after a booking with a provider has been completed. This means the journey runs in a natural order:

1. You find a provider and request a booking. Our guide on requesting a booking walks through this step.
2. You and the provider agree and carry out the work, communicating directly within the booking.
3. Once the work is finished and the booking is complete, you are able to leave a review.

This sequence is what makes DomusVesta reviews trustworthy. Nobody can leave a review for work that never happened, and nobody can review a provider they have not actually used.

What a review contains

A review captures both an overall impression and, if you wish, a more detailed breakdown.

• Overall star rating (required). Every review includes an overall rating from 1 to 5 stars. This is the headline score and the one part of a review that is always required.

• Category ratings (optional). If you want to give more detail, you can add separate star ratings across four categories:

  • Quality of work — how well the job was done.
  • Reliability — whether the provider turned up and delivered as agreed.
  • Communication — how clearly and promptly they kept in touch.
  • Price — how fair the cost felt for the work carried out.

These category ratings are optional, so you can leave a quick overall rating or a fuller, more considered review, whichever suits you. For tips on writing a helpful review, see our guide on leaving a review.

The Verified badge

Because reviews on DomusVesta can only come from completed bookings, every genuine review carries a Verified badge. This badge tells anyone reading the review that it came from a real, completed booking on the platform.

The Verified badge matters because it removes doubt. When you read reviews on a provider's profile, you are not wondering whether they are real or planted. The badge is your assurance that a genuine household booked the work, the work was completed, and then the review was left.

Provider responses

Reviews are a conversation, not a one-way verdict. After a household leaves a review, the provider can post a public response. This gives them the chance to thank a happy customer, add helpful context, or respond fairly and professionally if they see things differently.

For households reading reviews, a provider's responses can be just as revealing as the reviews themselves. A thoughtful, courteous response often tells you a great deal about how someone runs their business and how they would treat you.

Why this protects both sides

The design of the review system is deliberate, and it works in everyone's favour.

For households, it means you can rely on what you read. Every review reflects real, completed work, every genuine review is marked Verified, and the category ratings help you judge the things that matter most to you, whether that is reliability, communication or value. You are choosing providers based on real experiences from people like you.

For honest providers, it means their reputation cannot be damaged by fake or malicious reviews from people who never used them. Only a household that genuinely completed a booking can leave a review, and the provider always has the right to respond. Good, reliable work earns visible, trustworthy ratings, and those ratings feed into the trust tiers shown on each profile. You can read about those tiers in our guide on how we check and approve providers.

This balance, where reviews are genuine, verified and answerable, is what keeps DomusVesta fair. Households get honesty they can act on, and providers get a level playing field where good work is rewarded.

When your next job is complete, taking a moment to leave a thoughtful review is one of the most valuable things you can do for your local community. To get started, read our guide on leaving a review.