How do managers use smart guest review review strategies to gain a leg up on the competition?

Vacation rentals have evolved over the last few decades – moving from a niche category to one of the preferred ways to travel.

Booming demand is great for the industry. But the growth has also attracted a HUGE influx of self-managed rentals. This supply increase makes it harder for professional managers to showcase their brand and drive direct bookings.

Do Guests Reviews Make a Difference at Booking?

The modern consumer wants to make a confident buying decision. Some supporting stats…

• 29% of prospective guests read reviews before booking a home
• 6 distinct reviews are read before making the reservation

Review scores are moving the needle!

• One decimal point in average review score equates to more than 5% in average daily rates AND 2.8% in booking conversion. 

Higher review scores not only help you charge more for each reservation, but they also increase time spent on your website,  boosting click-through conversions, and driving higher occupancy rates.

Should Managers Respond to the Reviews They Get?
Responding to every review is not easy…But VRMs should always respond to the reviews, feedback, and inquiries that guests leave.

Responding to reviews shows you care about the experience your guests have with your product, and reinforces the trustworthiness and transparency of your brand.

This applies to negative feedback as well. Responding makes your guests feel heard, affords an opportunity to correct any misunderstandings, and demonstrates that you take responsibility when the guest experience falls short of expectations.

HUGE opportunity to stand out…

• Only one in three professional managers respond to reviews.
• And even when they do, just 29% of those responses are left within 72 hours of when the review was posted.

Generating and Promoting Your 5-Star Reviews

The best form of marketing is to provide a fantastic guest experience. If you ‘wow’ your guests during their stay, your review scores will follow suit. You need to be proactive. The best managers don’t just hope they get reviews.

** The operators who prompt guests to provide feedback receive a review 81% of the time. **

Many of the best VRMs embed review links within guest communication programs, enabling them to automatically solicit feedback upon check-out.

Once the reviews are received, the next step is to push reviews to the website, increasing SEO value, searchability, and conversion.

• 92% of managers with 50+ properties display at least 3 guest reviews on their website.

How to Actually Drive Insights From Guest Feedback

The customer feedback you get from reviews is one of your best data sources. There’s a lot of moving pieces though…

• Consolidating reviews from every channel in real-time
• Sorting and tagging by property/market/topic, etc.
• Responding to every review
• Showcasing your 5-star reviews on your website, and much more…

Making sense of it all is nearly impossible to do without an army of marketing analysts or purpose built guest review tools, and the managers who try to tape together manual processes often end up chasing their tails.

But when done effectively, best-in-class managers are able to… 

1. Source small issues before they become larger brand risks
2. Identify strengths for marketing campaigns
3. Identify brand weaknesses to prioritize and improve
4. Help convince homeowners to upgrade certain property details
5. Automatically publish 5-star reviews back to websites
6. Tie property care and review data together to grade staff performance

After years of trying to manage tens of thousands of reviews, Reva was built to help others aggregate, report and share guest reviews. If you’re interested in transforming your guest review strategy or giving our tools a test drive drop us a line here – we’d love to chat.

Interested in learning more about how Reva can help leverage guest reviews but need an introduction to the Reva team? No problem! Reach out to ICND here and we can get you going in the right direction.