General Guidelines

Marinas.com allows users to contribute content to the website in many different forms, including reviews, photos, videos, amenities, direct messages, reservation requests and more. We’ve put together these general guidelines to highlight both how we’ll act as the administrators of Marinas.com, as well as how we expect you to act as users of the site. Please also read the guidelines below for specific types of content that you might contribute to the site.

• Privacy: Don’t publicize other people’s private information. Please don’t post close-up photos or videos of anyone without their permission, and please don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to service providers who are commonly identified by or commonly share their own full names.
• Inappropriate Content: Colorful and strong language and imagery is fine, but there’s no need for swearing, threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, and other displays of bigotry.
• Conflicts of Interest: Your contributions should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer or your competitors in your harbor or region.
• Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are relevant and appropriate to the forum. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about a marina’s employment practices, political ideologies, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.
• Intellectual Property: Don’t swipe content from other sites or users. Please write your own reviews and take your own photos and videos, please! Any content that we find to be duplicated from any other site besides your own website will be removed from the site.
• Demanding Payment: Beyond simply asking for a refund to remedy a bad experience, you should not use removing or posting your review as a way to extract payment from a marina or other business, regardless of whether you’ve been a customer.

Messaging Guidelines

Marinas.com has a handy messaging feature to keep you connected with Marinas.com business owners. First off, please don’t use this feature to harass marinas or send other inappropriate content. Second, user accounts are for personal, non-commercial use only. Marina owners should message reviewers using their Marinas.com Business Account.

Review Guidelines

Our entire community, including boaters and marinas, benefits when boaters share their firsthand consumer experiences. To maximize the value of boater reviews to other boaters and to avoid unnecessary harm to marinas, we ask that our boater users follow the following guidelines:

• Firsthand Experience: Tell boaters about your personal experience, not someone else’s.
• Specificity: Tell boaters what actually happened. Avoid broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.
• Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don’t exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don’t take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your review.
• Updates: Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don’t tell the same old story you’ve already told. If you’d like to add new insight to an old experience, just edit your review instead of creating a new update.

Will Marinas.com Remove a Review?

If you believe that a review violates our Review Guidelines, please report it and include any information that our moderators can independently verify. If our moderators determine that a review was unhelpful to the community because it violated the Review Guidelines, we may either pull down the review or ask the reviewer to revise the review to comply with the Review Guidelines. For example, we may ask a review to:

• Remove third-hand accounts or statements of reputation
• Specify general statements that may be damaging to marinas
• Provide the factual basis for serious allegations

The purpose of the Review Guidelines is to encourage honest reviews that help boaters choose marinas and help marinas get constructive feedback. We reserve the absolute discretion to enforce the Review Guidelines and remove reviews in the manner we feel best serves our community.

In factual disputes, we don’t typically take sides and we generally allow Marinas.com boaters to stand behind their reviews. If you received notification that the review you reported was not removed by our moderators, but you or your lawyer have obtained a final adjudication from a court of competent jurisdiction indicating that the review is defamatory, please contact our support team.

Please keep in mind that we also use automated software to determine which reviews to recommend to our users, so even if our moderators don’t remove the review, our software may separately determine that it isn’t useful or reliable enough to show to our users. Business owners should also feel free to use their business accounts to publicly respond to any inaccuracies in the review, right on Marinas.com.

How do I Respond to Reviews of My Business?

If you have claimed your Marinas.com business page, you have the option of responding to reviews with a public comment which will appear just under the review that was left. Simply login to Marinas.com, navigate to your marina’s listing page and click on “Manage Profile.” Once there, click on “Reviews” in the top navigation and then click “Respond to Review” on any review you’d like to respond to.

My Marina has changed hands. What happens now?

When a marine business is transferred to new owners or management but the core customer experience remains the same, marina admin are welcome to let boaters know about the change in the “About Us” section of their claimed profile. Please reach out to mayday@marinas.com if you are involved with new management and would like help gaining access to an existing profile.

If new ownership is accompanied by changes in the location or other fundamental elements or branding of the business, a new marina page may be created. This is applicable on a case-by case basis, with the goal of helping boaters differentiate between old and new experiences.

Can I Remove My Marina’s Page From Marinas.com?

Marinas.com publishes marina and other maritime business information so that consumers (mariners) can share their experiences about local businesses. Because the information is typically a matter of public record and public concern, we do not remove marina profile pages from the site.

While we understand that some business owners might prefer to keep a low profile, it’s important (and a legal right) for consumers to be able to find and share helpful information about marinas and other great local businesses.

If you need to update or change the information on your business page, please submit any changes by claiming your marina and clicking the Manage Profile button. You will then be able to edit amenities and other supplementary information about your marina. If you would not like to receive messages or reservation requests from boaters, please contact us and we will help you “unclaim” your profile.