Community Guidelines

While the best advice is to use common sense and be respectful, following guidelines ensure our community remains fun, upbeat, and open to all travelers.

These guidelines apply to the Rick Steves Guides blog, Lale Aran's blog, SRM Travel blog and any other forum allowing comments by the public on websites and other social media accounts administered by SRM Travel / Lale Aran.

        • Stay on topic. Make your contribution relevant to the original post.
        • Be polite. Comments that contain inappropriate language, harshly criticize, or disrespect others' opinions are not allowed. New travelers should be shown extra patience as they sometimes need more help than others. If you can't write politely, move on.
        • Report guideline violations. Inform the webmaster so that appropriate action can be taken.
        • Do not react openly to guideline violations. Someone else's violation is not an excuse for you to respond or react in a way that violates our guidelines. Keep arguments off our boards at all times. Avoid direct responses to others' comments as such behavior leads to bickering.
Stay on topic. Report violations.
        • Do not feed the trolls. Do not be a troll. A "troll" is someone who posts messages intended to infuriate you and elicit a response. Trolls "feed" on such responses. Ignoring trolls is the only solution. Report abuse to the webmaster.
        • Do not advertise or post fake reviews. Proposing transactions or promoting your website, blog, hotel, restaurant, uncle's private tours in Istanbul, etc for financial gain, pumping traffic to your website, or other marketing intent is prohibited.
        • Do not help people break laws. Speaking of the existence of law breaking is OK. Sharing how to circumvent visa restrictions, scam hotels, or perform other illegal acts is prohibited.
        • Do not impersonate or invade privacy. Impersonating members of the community, our staff, or anyone else will not be tolerated. Do not post private information about others.

        • Businesses... read carefully. You may make a single brief statement, explanation, or clarification with regard to the review in question. You may invite the reviewer to contact you privately either by issuing a phone number, email address (though this may open you up to spam), customer service related URL, or by inviting the reviewer to contact you via our Private Message system. That is all!
You may not... in any way advertise or promote your business. Do not include any URLs that are outside of direct customer service use. For example, giving a link to your site's homepage will get your post deleted. Discussing aspects of your business unrelated to the review will also get your post removed. You may not make any unsolicited posts regarding your business. Businesses should resolve issues through their own channels and not openly on our boards. Report genuine defamation to the webmaster.

Important Fine Print:
        • Please return regularly to review our rules and guidelines for periodic updates.
        • You are responsible for your own actions and content posted. Posting your email address and other personal contact information on our forums should be avoided.
        • All rules and guidelines equally apply to our Private Message system. Private Messages are not private from the webmaster.
        • At our discretion, we reserve the right to monitor all interactions between you and other community members.
        • We reserve the right to discipline or ban any community member for violating the rules, guidelines, and/or spirit of our community.
        • Banishment results in, but is not limited to, the closure of all accounts held by a user. Such users are not permitted to return to the SRM Travel / Lale Aran Community under any circumstance.
        • Content provided by members of our community reflect the opinions and experience of those members, not us.
        • Content posted at our social media accounts becomes the property of SRM Travel / Lale Aran and may be edited, deleted, published or otherwise used by us. We do not check the accuracy of posted content and accept no responsibility for loss, injury, inconvenience, or bad kebab sustained by any person using the free advice received from our community members.
        • Content found in the SRM Travel / Lale Aran Community is not to be used for formal and/or professional research, commercial gain, or redistribution in any way without the permission of SRM Travel Inc. and the Community member(s) involved.
        • Where applicable, our Community Guidelines apply to outside websites administered by SRM Travel / Lale Aran such as Facebook and YouTube. Outside websites and certain  forums have additional rules that must be followed.