How to Spot Fake Wedding Reviews (and Find the Real Ones)

Why fake reviews are so common in the wedding industry

Weddings are high-value, one-off, emotional purchases. A single booking can be worth thousands of pounds, and most couples never come back to leave a follow-up review months later. That combination — high stakes, low repeat scrutiny — is exactly the environment where fake and incentivised reviews thrive.

On directory-style sites, anyone can often post a review without ever having booked the supplier. That opens the door to glowing reviews written by friends, family and the business itself, as well as the occasional sabotage review left by a competitor.

Seven warning signs of a fake review

• A burst of five-star reviews posted within a few days of each other, then silence.
• Vague praise with no specifics — "amazing service, highly recommend" — and no mention of an actual wedding date, venue or package.
• Identical phrasing or sentence structure across several reviews (a tell-tale sign of copy-paste or AI generation).
• Reviewer profiles with no history, no photo, and a single review to their name.
• Reviews that read like marketing copy, repeating the supplier’s own brand language and keywords.
• A suspiciously perfect average — real suppliers, however good, collect the occasional 3- or 4-star review.
• No way to tell whether the reviewer actually paid for and received the service.

What a trustworthy review looks like

Genuine reviews tend to be specific and a little uneven. They name the date or season, describe what actually happened on the day, and mention small, concrete details — the supplier who arrived early to reassure a nervous couple, the florist who quietly remade a buttonhole that wilted. Real reviewers also tend to mention at least one minor imperfection, because no wedding is flawless.

The single most important question to ask of any review is simple: can the platform prove this person actually booked and paid?

The gold standard: reviews tied to a verified booking

The most reliable signal of all is a review that can only exist because a real, completed booking sits behind it. If a platform only lets you review a supplier after you have booked, paid and had your wedding through that same platform, the entire category of fake reviews simply cannot occur — there is no booking to attach the review to.

This is the principle Adoure is built on. Every Adoure review is linked to a completed on-platform booking and checked by our team before it counts toward a supplier’s Adoure Mark. There is no way to buy a review, plant one, or pay to bury a bad one — because rankings are earned from verified experience, never bought with ad spend.

A quick checklist before you book

• Ask the supplier directly for two recent couples you can contact.
• Cross-check their reviews against their real social media — do the weddings shown match the reviews?
• Look for reviews that mention specifics you can verify.
• Favour platforms where reviews are tied to a verified booking and independently checked.

Trust your instincts, do a little homework, and lean on platforms that make faking a review structurally impossible. Your future self — and your wedding budget — will thank you.