Can you trust the reviews?
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If you have looked up a salon or a bathhouse here, you may have noticed that the reviews often look uniformly glowing, and that this makes them less useful rather than reassuring.
What we can say
Review pages are not always a neutral record. In 2017 Korea's competition regulator took action against three accommodation booking platforms that had hidden negative reviews and placed paid listings at the top of search results without saying they had been paid for. We have not measured how common this kind of thing is and we are not going to give you a percentage we made up.
Reading them anyway
Look past the star average. Read the middle ratings, where people describe what actually happened. Look at photos taken by customers rather than the shop. Check the date, because a place can change owner and staff in a year. For a salon, a review only tells you about the specific designer who did the work, which is why a shop can be excellent and disappointing in the same week.
Complaints about facts are more useful than praise about feelings. If several people mention that card payment failed, or that the place closed early, that is information.
What we do instead
We do not aggregate reviews into a score. We collect specific facts, we record who told us and when, and we show that date to you. A fact confirmed by the venue is marked as such. A fact we have not confirmed is shown as not confirmed rather than guessed.
That is a smaller promise than a five star average, and it is one we can keep.