Türkiye’s 2026 online review rules: what they mean for hotel reviews

Türkiye's amended Article 28/B of the Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices Regulation, in force 1 August 2026, governs review areas that sellers and providers run online: only buyers may review, reviews stay published for at least a year, a verified resolution can sit beside the original complaint, and paid untrue reviews are barred. This is the Türkiye online review regulation 2026 that hotels need to read against their own channels.

A guest checks out unhappy, writes nothing, and the hotel hears about it three weeks later in a public review that nobody answered. From 1 August 2026 the rules around that review changed, and most of them land on the surfaces the hotel itself controls. After reading this you will know what the amended text says, which of your review channels it touches, and which questions to take to your legal adviser.

What changed on 1 August 2026?#

The Ministry of Trade amended the Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices Regulation, published the change in the Official Gazette on 1 July 2026 (No. 33297) (opens in a new tab), and it took effect on 1 August 2026. The amendment rewrote the article that governs online consumer reviews, Article 28/B.

Name the instrument precisely when you discuss it internally: the amending regulation is the Ticari Reklam ve Haksız Ticari Uygulamalar Yönetmeliğinde Değişiklik Yapılmasına Dair Yönetmelik, and its Articles 12 and 15 carry the changes to Article 28/B. Keep the two dates apart. 1 July 2026 is publication; 1 August 2026 is when the new wording starts to apply. A review published in July sits under the old text, one published in August under the new one.

This is secondary legislation under consumer protection law. It binds sellers and providers who open a review area online, which is a wider group than marketplaces and booking platforms. It matters to hotels because a hotel may run several review surfaces it controls: a comments form on the website, a rating inside the booking engine, a guest app, or a feedback page that publishes what guests write.

The amended text is short. The four rules in the next section are, in substance, everything a hotel needs from it; the rest of what circulates online is commentary. Treat law-firm notes and news summaries as pointers only. They paraphrase. The wording that counts is in the Official Gazette text, and your adviser should read the consolidated article with you.

What does Article 28/B require, in plain words?#

Four duties, plus two prohibitions on where reviews may come from and how they may be used. Each one is a rule about the review area itself, not about how the hotel feels about a particular comment.

Only buyers may review. Where a seller or provider lets consumers review it online, the review must come from someone who actually bought the goods or service. Reviews stay up for at least one year, and positive and negative are not separated. A setting that hides reviews after 90 days, or that files complaints into a separate tab a guest has to go looking for, does not fit the wording.

A resolution is published next to the original complaint. If the provider resolves the complaint and this is reported, the resolution is published after verification in the same place as the original review. Nobody may be paid or engaged to write untrue reviews: that covers cash, and it covers engaging a person or an agency to produce reviews.

The purchase must be verifiable. The amended article bars publishing reviews taken from channels where the purchase cannot be verified. Unverified reviews may not be used in advertisements either: a pull quote on the website or in a campaign has to come from a review whose purchase the hotel can stand behind.

Read each rule as a design question about your own system: who is allowed to submit, how the stay is matched to the review, how long it stays visible, and who signs off on a resolution.

Which review channels does your hotel actually control?#

Anywhere your hotel lets guests review it online and you decide what appears: your own website, your booking engine, your guest app, and any survey or feedback page whose comments are published rather than kept private.

Apply three tests to each surface. Does the hotel decide whether a comment is published? Can the comment be tied to a stay? Does the hotel keep it online, and for how long? A yes to the first and a no to the second is exactly the combination the amended article addresses.

A private survey is not a public review area. A questionnaire emailed to one guest after checkout, whose answers go to the manager, is internal feedback, and the same material can be used well if you follow a sound survey routine. The moment those answers appear on a public page with the guest's name or rating, it becomes a review area. A booking engine that shows a star rating and guest comments is a review area the hotel operates, even if the software is supplied by someone else. The supplier builds the tool; the hotel runs the policy. A guest app that collects requests and comments raises the same question: if comments are published to future guests, the four rules apply to them.

Verification is the hard part in practice. A review link sent from the reservation record is verifiable; an open form that anyone can submit is not, and the amended text bars publishing from channels where the purchase cannot be verified. Retention is a setting, not an opinion. Plan for at least a year of visible history, and check what happens when a guest asks for a review to be removed: the text points to publishing a resolution, not to deletion.

Do the rules apply to Google, Tripadvisor and booking sites?#

The text governs review areas run by sellers and providers, and it names no platform. Whether it reaches a hotel's replies on a third-party review site is not settled by the wording alone, so this is a question for your adviser, not for a blog post.

Separate two things that get mixed up. Who operates the review area, and who behaves badly inside it. On a third-party site the platform operates the area; the hotel is a business being reviewed there. The prohibitions follow the hotel's own conduct wherever it happens: paying for reviews, or using unverified reviews in an advertisement, is the hotel's act even when the review sits on someone else's site.

A booking site or marketplace that runs a review area is closer to the wording of the article, because it is an intermediary operating the area. What that means for its own processes is its problem, not a duty you can discharge for it. Your relationship with those platforms is mostly contractual: their terms govern what you may ask guests to do, how you may respond, and what you may do with the content. Read those terms alongside the regulation, and read them alongside good reply practice, because a calm reply inside the platform's own rules remains your best public move.

Take a written question to counsel: for each channel on your list, are we the operator of the review area, a participant, or neither? The answer decides which of the four rules you own.

What changed for complaint platforms?#

The same amending regulation changed Article 28/C, which covers platforms whose main activity is publishing consumer complaints: the business now gets 48 hours to explain or reply before a complaint is published, where the previous wording gave at least 72.

Scope first. Article 28/C is about complaint platforms, meaning sites whose main activity is publishing online consumer complaints about goods, services or their sellers and providers. It is a different article from the review rules in 28/B. The window is shorter: the amending text sets 48 hours for the seller or provider to explain or reply, down from at least 72 hours.

Silence publishes. If no reply comes within that period, the complaint is published directly, so a monitored inbox is now an operational requirement rather than good manners. The unchanged parts still apply: a complaint is not published before the period ends, and it is not published if it is found to be untrue. The reply route must be effective and must not depend on membership or a fee; a platform that only lets paying members respond does not meet that.

Whether a given site counts as a complaint platform is a legal question about its main activity, not a judgement about how it feels to be reviewed there. Ask counsel, and read the consolidated article rather than this summary.

What should a hotel do now?#

Four moves: verify the stay before publishing, keep the negatives up, publish a verified resolution beside the original review, and stop paying for reviews in any form.

Verify at the point of collection. Send the review invitation from the reservation record, keep the booking reference with the review, and close any open submission form that lets a stranger post. Keep the history: set retention to at least a year, show positive and negative in one list, and remove any rule that hides a comment after a set number of days or pushes complaints into a separate tab.

Build a place for the resolution. When a complaint has been fixed, invite the guest to report it, verify that the fix happened, and publish the resolution next to the original review. This is the mechanism the text offers, and it is more useful to a future guest than a deleted comment. Stop paying, and stop accepting: no cash, no discount, no upgrade, no prize, no agency producing reviews.

Questions to put to your legal adviser#

Write the questions down before the meeting, so the answers come in writing too. Does each of our channels count as a review area we operate? How do we verify a stay bought through an agency? Can we keep a review a guest asks us to delete? What may we quote in advertising? Which of our current campaigns or agency arrangements need to stop?

Give the routine a weekly slot rather than a yearly review, so that a complaint platform reply and a resolution note are handled while the guest still remembers the stay. A weekly reputation routine for a small team fits this, and because reviews carry personal data, the retention and access questions belong with your KVKK practice too.

What to do next#

Take the list of places your hotel publishes guest comments, and read the Official Gazette text of 1 July 2026 with your legal adviser against that list. The four rules then become a one-page internal policy, and the policy becomes a weekly routine: verify the stay, keep the negative, answer inside the window, and publish the fix next to the complaint.