What is the Editorial Policy of Leading Courses?

From day one we believe that the best advice on where to play comes from other golfers. That's why our tagline has always been: by golfers, for golfers. 

You, the golfer, and the content that you produce (i.e. reviews, photos) help us to help other golfers to plan their next golf trip. Your experiences are the oxygen of our ecosystem. And that is why we take that very seriously.

Day in, and day out we do our best to make sure that all reviews on our site are genuine reviews that comply with our editorial policy. This is also the case for photos. 

We thought it would be helpful to share our Editorial Policy and the actions we take to identify, block, and remove fraudulent reviews and photos.

Our General Policy

Every golfer should feel confident to share their opinion. You can do this by using an alias, but we prefer real names if you feel comfortable doing so. Either way, be assured that we will never share your personal details with a golf club or third party, even if that means going to court.

Every experience counts, so if you are in a flight of 4 golfers, everyone can share their opinion. Each experience may differ, based on handicap, needs and wants of each individual golfer. You can even write multiple reviews of the same course. Your experience might improve or worsen. It might even be dependent on the season, your score or the weather.

As we strongly believe in promoting personal experiences, we do not take the decision to deactivate a review lightly. It might be easier to give in to censorship and remove reviews that a course manager disagrees with, but it goes against what we stand for, the right for genuine golfers to share their experiences.

We want you to share your story, both the good and the bad. All we ask is that you follow a few simple guidelines.

All reviews are treated the same

Every review will be manually read by our content team and checked against the same predefined criteria:

• the review text must comply with ourTerms and Conditions  (in particular article 7);
• the review text must consist of a minimum of 5 words;
• it is not allowed to use a review to promote a certain brand or company;
• reviews consisting of only 10.0s (or a rating very close to that) will be flagged. We will contact you to understand the reasoning behind giving only 10.0s. If no response is received (bounced e-mail or no answer), the review will be disapproved.
• reviews consisting of only 1.0s (or a rating very close to that) will be flagged. We will contact you to understand the reasoning behind giving only 1.0s. If no response is received (bounced e-mail or no answer), the review will be disapproved.
• reviews written during or slightly after a dispute with a golf club can be subject to removal if the objective of that review is to discredit the golf club (proof of a dispute needs to be handed over by the golf club);
• reviews that aim to deliberately hurt a golf club - for example by posting the same review on multiple platforms - can be subject to deactivation;
• reviews written by an employee of a golf club about that specific golf club will be disapproved;
• the reviewer must have played the course, just being a visitor is not enough;
• reviews that are a complaint, whether or not because one was not able to play - due to a misunderstanding, bad weather, etc. - can unfortunately not be posted
• duplicate reviews of the same experience will be removed;
• URLs will be removed from the text;
• multiple punctuation marks will be removed from the text;
• punctuation might be added to improve readability;
• obvious spelling mistakes will also be corrected as much as possible;

Asking for reviews

We have no problem with golf clubs asking golfers to write reviews. Actually, we love clubs that do that. We even offer free widgets and provide golf clubs with business cards to promote the writing of reviews. Golf clubs are not allowed to ask golfers to write a positive review. Golf clubs are also not allowed to offer golfers compensation for retracting their (negative) reviews. If we suspect such behaviour, we may disqualify such clubs from our Golfers' Choice Awards and Seals of Approval (Recommended / Outstanding).

Photo Policy

You are free to upload any photo of a golf course. But please try to make photos that illustrate the character of a hole or golf course. Or the ambience of a golf club. We reserve the right to remove photos if they:

• do not comply with our Terms and Conditions (in particular article 7);
• are duplicates or almost identical;
• do not apply to a certain golf club;

Golf club employees and other golfers are allowed to flag photos for removal if they do not comply with the policy mentioned above. If you use other people’s pictures, make sure you have the right permissions for this.