Contributor Guidelines

We at Cool Places know how important it is to have reliable and trustworthy information when planning your travels. Before submitting a user suggestion, please read these guidelines carefully as they help us to ensure that the suggestions and reviews we publish are accurate, relevant and fair.

Linking to Cool Places

Feel free to tell others about Cool Places and by all means, link to our site, or directly to your review. Please refer to the site as Cool Places (two words, initial caps). URLs for the site should always be in our preferred form all lowercase, and starting with www, e.g.  www.coolplaces.co.uk

Suggesting/Reviewing Places

What is a Cool Place?

Before suggesting a new place, please read the following guidelines:

• You know you’ve found a cool place if it can be described as special, unique, memorable, inspiring and independent. A cool place has bags of character and really brings out the best of the city or town it belongs to. We’re talking about restaurants with seasonal, local and fresh produce, pubs with a wide selection of locally brewed ales, individual hotels and B&Bs with owners and staff that go the extra mile, museums with compelling unusual exhibits, imaginatively displayed.
• Then ask yourself, 'would I recommend this place to my best friend because I think they'd really like it?' If the answer is yes, then it's a cool place!
• You can suggest any place to sleep, eat & drink, see & do, or an amenity that meets our listing criteria.
• We reserve the right to not publish or unpublish suggestions and reviews for any reason.

If you think that you own a cool place, then we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us and tell us why you should be featured.

How to Write a Cool Places Suggestion or Review

In order to write a Cool Places suggestion or post a review of an existing place, you must register on the Cool Places website. It won't cost you anything and only takes a few seconds. Just visit the sign up page, fill in your name and email, and wait for a confirmation email - that's it!. Please follow these guidelines when writing a review or suggesting a place:

• In order to keep the Cool Places website current, please only suggest places you have visited within a year of your submission.
• Please be as positive as possible - by all means tell us when places haven't come up to your expectations, but be reasonable: anyone can make a mistake and if you feel that your experiences was a one-off, say so. Our aim at Cool Places is to support the businesses we write about, while at the same time getting them to up their game when they need to.
• Suggestions must be based on your experience, not second-hand information, hearsay, unverified information, rumours or quotations from other sources or the reported opinions/experience of others.
• Please do not use ALL CAPS, excessive typographic symbols, HTML tags or slang in your suggestions or reviews.
• Please try to follow the prompts on the “suggest a place” entry form as closely possible.
• Owners, management, current or past employees, or anyone associated or related to employees of an establishment listed on our site are not allowed to post suggestions.
• Please refrain from using the Cool Places website for smear campaigns and please do not submit any information that is irrelevant and unhelpful to other Cool Places users.
• Please be honest: if you are the owner of a business, please register and submit your comments as such.

• Cool Places is not a forum for general political, ethical or religious opinions, discussion or commentary.
• Questions or comments directed to property representatives are not allowed.
• We will not post any comments or questions directed to or about the Cool Places team. If you wish to speak to a member of Cool Places then please contact us.
• Suggestions should contain only original content and no quoted material from other sources.
• Commercial e-mail addresses, contact information and promotional information are not allowed in any suggestion. We reserve the right to reject any URL for any reason.
• Profanity, threats, prejudices comments, hate speech, sexually explicit language and all other non-family-friendly content will not be tolerated.
• Cool Places does not tolerate spamming or gratuitous links to other sites.  Users caught persistently spamming will be suspended immediately.
• No graphic reports of criminal activity - please send those to the police instead!

Small Print

Please note that Cool Places reserves the right to remove a review, suggestion or owner response at any time for whatever reason. The subjective opinions expressed in suggestions/reviews on the Cool Places website are those of Cool Places users and not of Cool Places Ltd. Please refer to our user agreement for the full terms and conditions for contributions.