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Where reviews come from

A rating on its own says very little. Four point nine from thirty voices is not the same as four point nine from five thousand, and a review anyone may write is not the same as one a platform asks for after a piece of business. This page explains the difference and sets out where our own figures come from.

Two kinds of source

Both are lawful and both have their place. It only becomes a problem when an open source is presented as a verified customer voice.

Our figures, broken down

5,027 reviews in total, averaging 4.98 out of 5, as at 30 September 2026. All three are German-language platforms, which is where most of our customers are. The totals are aggregated by Trustami, where the sum can be checked.

We spell this out because the open share belongs in the picture: part of our figure comes from a platform that verifies nobody. Anyone reading our rating should know what is inside it.

How we choose what is shown

The individual voices on our German review page are sorted by date, newest first, and displayed in that order. The star rating plays no part. No line in the software filters by it, and nobody edits by hand: a daily job fetches the texts from the platform unchanged, and the next job overwrites any manual edit.

The pool currently holds 13 individual voices, 13 from AUSGEZEICHNET.org. Wording, stars, name and date are taken as they stand. Nothing is shortened or smoothed over, because an edited customer voice would be an invented one.

It is still a selection, and that should be said plainly: not every voice, but the most recent ones. The criterion simply has nothing to do with the rating.

Six questions for any rating

• Whose figure is it? A rating always belongs to one company and often to one branch, not to a group and not to a brand.
• Over what period? A rating drawn from twenty years hides how things are running today.
• Was anyone allowed to write? Or only those invited after a piece of business.
• Are the voices shown a selection? And if so, on what basis. When every voice on display carries top marks, that is rarely chance.
• Is there a link to the source? Without one, neither the count nor the average can be checked, and the poor reviews stay out of sight.
• Which product do they concern? Someone who chartered a yacht for a fortnight had a different experience from an owner insuring their own boat.

The rules behind this

Since 2022 this has been written into European consumer law. Directive (EU) 2019/2161, which amended the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, obliges a trader who advertises with consumer reviews to state whether and how it ensures those reviews come from people who actually used the product or service. That is a duty to inform, not a ban.

The stricter rule sits in the blacklist of practices that are unfair in all circumstances: claiming that reviews come from genuine users without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to verify it. Every member state has transposed both into national law; NAMMERT is a German undertaking and is bound by the German implementation. That is why the word verified no longer sits above our figures. The origin does.