Should You Be Writing Guest Reviews as a Vacation Rental Owner?
Your Guide To Writing Guest Reviews
On vacation rental listing sites like Airbnb and Vrbo, it’s essential to earn good reviews from guests who have stayed with you. But one feature of these sites that often goes ignored by owners is the ability to leave reviews for guests. Many hosts only utilize guest reviews when they need to report a bad experience or problem guest, but there are multiple benefits to writing reviews for your guests.
In this article, we’ll outline the advantages of leaving guest reviews and give you some tips on how to write them.
The Advantages of Leaving Reviews for Guests
Help Out Other Vacation Rental Hosts
Guest reviews are your chance to evaluate your own guest experience as an owner, whether for good or ill. Because these reviews are always visible to other hosts, you also have a chance to warn future owners about people who have caused problems or damaged your property. Alternately, if your experience with a guest was wonderful and they have received nothing but good reviews in the past, this is also useful information for future bookings. Ensure you include helpful things in your guest review, like how the property was treated, the level of cleanliness the guests exhibited, and if they followed all of the house rules.
In the same vein, it’s always good practice to check out prior reviews that have been left for your guests. This can help to warn you about issues you might run into or give you an idea if the guest is a good fit for your property.
Remind Guests to Leave Their Own Reviews
People typically only review things when they’ve had an extremely positive or negative experience, so guests often forget to leave reviews after their stays. When you write feedback for your guests, you’re helping to prompt them to write their own review for their stay. Most platforms will send guests a message once you’ve left them feedback, so you won’t even have to reach out and remind them yourself.
Turn the Tide on Bad Reviews
No matter how well you do your job as a short-term rental owner, it’s hard to completely avoid bad reviews. However, when you leave feedback for your guests or respond to a negative review publicly, it can also help you to explain your side of the story to an angry guest and to future guests as well.
On Airbnb, for instance, you can publicly respond to every review that you receive, whether positive or negative. Not only does this allow you to defend yourself from bad reviews, it also promotes more engagement on your listing when you reply to the good reviews as well.
Best Practices for Writing Guest Reviews
Evaluate Your Guests Fairly and Honestly
Leaving a good guest review is an art form, but one essential aspect of it is to be open and honest in your evaluation of your guests. Because your guests will see this review, along with other hosts, it’s important that you keep it factual and helpful. Where are areas that they could improve? What did they do well? Would you host them again, or recommend them to other hosts? All of these questions should be answered tactfully to provide future hosts with the most value.
Give Guests a Score Based on Consistent Factors
When it comes to reviewing your guests, consistency should be one of your first considerations. Perhaps you’re having a bad day or you are feeling unfairly biased towards certain guests who were merely annoying–instead of reviewing them with your emotions, try to prioritize more consistent factors, such as:
Rules: Were they able to stick to and abide by all of the house rules?
Cleanliness: Did they leave the property in the condition they found it or was there a large mess left for the cleaners to handle?
Communication: Did the guest take the time to communicate with you about any issues or problems they had?
Experience: Did you have a good experience hosting them or did they have an outsized number of issues and problems? Would you host this person again?
In order to be as fair as possible to guests, it’s vital that you write reviews that consider the same factors each and every time.
Don’t Forget to Be Professional
Because you are running a business, your reputation only benefits when you stay calm, collected, and professional in the face of a scathingly bad review or a problem guest. Stick to the facts but highlight any good or bad experiences in a fair manner. In the long run, you’ll appear more trustworthy to future guests if you keep your cool during the tough times, and travelers are more willing to stay with someone who knows how to deal with problems with a smile.
Discover More Ways to Improve Your Vacation Rental Business
Leaving reviews for your guests might seem like a small and easily-forgotten detail, but it can make a big difference. Not only does leaving guest reviews help you to build a deeper relationship with the guests that you loved hosting, but it can also aid other owners in learning which guests to watch out for.
Hoping to find more tips to make your vacation rental business a success? Take a look at our guide to getting repeat guests or check out our tips for dealing with a bad review.