Answering reviews written by vacation rental guests can be hard. Even warm reviews can create dilemmas when responding. The question arises if you even need to answer all those reviews. The answer is yes. Answered reviews demonstrate that a business is connected, listens, and cares. Whether the review is good or bad, you improve your reputation by answering. After writing replies to hundreds of reviews, here’s what I’ve learned.
Answering Angry Vacation Rental Reviews
When a guest has a valid complaint, responding can elicit multiple cringes. Whether it is a cleaning oversight, an unexpected living condition, or a mistake in the booking system, the error is yours. Those can be the hardest to answer. However, when done properly, they might also turn out to be the easiest. Here’s how.
1. Investigate the Problem
Find out who is responsible and why. Call your cleaning company and find out what happened or ask your sales team how the booking error occurred. You can’t fix a problem that has “no source.” Establish how the problem occurred in the first place.
2. Solve the Problem
Solve the problems the customer noted, even if they’ve already left. Have the cleaning manager train the person who made the mistake. If the guest complained about a living condition, such as too much noise, put a note about that condition in the rental description. While such a note won’t make the noise disappear, it will no longer come as a surprise to guests, which will help a great deal. If it is a booking error, perhaps you have another rental that guests can use. In some situations, a refund may be the only solution. Follow your company policy for such situations but do something to resolve the customer upset.
3. Report that the Problem Is Solved
Now that you solved the problem, it’s time to write the response to that bad review. Am I saying you should let that bad review sit while all of the above is going on? Yes. On some sites you only get one shot to answer. Make it count. Resolving problems like the ones above should not take too long. If you find time stretching on, you can do two things; change the way your company operates and take action regardless of the resolution.
- Streamline your operations so that, in the future, problems resolve faster.
- It can be done. When a staff writer, I had the company owner’s support in getting the above system in place. It was the owner’s task to ask why the problem happened, but when I asked if it was resolved, the staff answered to the best of their abilities. As soon as I got my answer, I wrote the review response. After a short time, we all got quite good at working together.
- When the time stretches too long, it’s time to take action despite not reaching a resolution. Write the response. Note that your business takes the problem seriously. Then state that you are currently looking into it or mention whatever steps you are taking. This is a temporary patch for the hard-to-solve issues. It should not become a habit. If people realize that you offer such as a standard response, it will damage your credibility.
No matter how bad the problem is, when you report that it is solved and how you did it, review readers will be satisfied. Instead of seeing you as a bad company, they will see you as a company that had a problem and then solved it. It will show that you care and that, if they have a problem, you will support them.
Never Respond in Anger
In all the time of answering reviews, through all those hundreds of responses, I only considered a remarkably small number of them be bad apples. Only two, in fact, turned out to be impossible to satisfy. One of those turned out to be a professional “troll.”
A vacation is supposed to be a dreamy time of relaxation and fun. Lots of expectations go with it. When that bubble is burst, upsets occur. If you paid thousands for your vacation rental, the tub should be clean, shouldn’t it? Well, of course it should. Those guests should never receive a response that makes them wrong for their dissatisfaction. It is up to the person answering your reviews to maintain a cool, kind, and understanding demeanor – at all times. That doesn’t mean that person can’t roll their eyes once in a while, but when it comes time to put fingers to keyboard, disparaging thoughts should be cast aside.
Please note: a passive-aggressive response isn’t going to fool anyone.
Fighting a Damaging Review
Once in a while, a guest will defame you in a way that is untruthful and damaging. You do have recourse when that happens. If you can show that the review is dishonest, many sites will take them down. That doesn’t mean they will make it easy for you. You will have to contact the company that published the review and ask for its removal. If you are certain it is false and adamant that it should be taken down, perseverance may bring success. Be prepared, however. Sometimes it is impossible to get them removed.
What to Do When Guests Threaten a Bad Review
When a guest threatens a bad review, it might seem like they have you over a barrel. That is usually not true. You see, if someone says, “Give me a discount or I’ll write a bad review,” that’s extortion. It is an illegal act. One company I worked with would politely point that fact out to the customers, reminding them that they were speaking over a recorded phone line. That dissolved 99% of those threats. Reviews have power and modern customers know it. How you solve that volatile situation is up to you, but you do have options.
Upset Customers Want Acknowledgement
Remember, a person who is upset usually hasn’t had anyone listen to them and tell them they’re right, or at the very least acknowledge them for what they said. A mere “That’s not good,” or “That shouldn’t have happened,” will diffuse a surprising number of those upsets. After you acknowledge them, you may find yourself teaming up with that customer to solve the problem. Defusing problems in that way, right when you receive a complaint, can intercept bad reviews before they happen.
Responding to Good Vacation Rental Reviews
Good reviews require responses just as much as bad ones. When the review is favorable, you have plenty of options. For one, you can just say “Thanks!” Don’t overdo that one, of course. Your responses should be varied and genuine. If the customers compliment the view, agree with them and say that the sunsets on your beach are beautiful. The variations are as plentiful as the types of reviews written. Just answer positively, agreeing with their viewpoint. After all, your vacation rental is probably in a good spot and it should be easy to pull forth positive points to back up their views.
Respond to Reviews Regularly
When I took over writing reviews for one company, they had a deep, unanswered backlog. Some could not be answered because they’d been archived by the host sites. I set a cutoff date and dug in. I answered the oldest ones first and moved forward. Simultaneously, I answered all the new reviews as they came in each day. It took some doing, but I closed the gap until the company had no unanswered reviews.
Zero unanswered reviews is the ideal situation. If you do not have the staff or the time and resources to clean up your backlog, at the very least you should answer all your new reviews. You can usually do so in just ten to twenty minutes each day. The value of well-answered reviews can’t be understated in our current online shopping economy.
Where Are My Vacation Rental Reviews?
The sites where you list your vacation rentals should have reviews for your rentals on them. That’s the case with HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, and most others. Learn how to login so that you always have access to your reviews. Set up email notifications if you don’t have them already. Each site will work differently but it is worth your time to figure them out.
Evaluate the Value of the Review Site
You will also notice a number of other review sites have collected reviews on you. Not all review sites are created equal. Some have algorithms that label your five star reviews as suspicious and deem your more tainted reviews as valuable. You will have to decide if those sites are worth your time. Not all of them will be.
Answering Vacation Rental Reviews
Answering your vacation rental reviews is vital. An article on learn.g2crowd.com related that reviews influenced 97% of shoppers’ buying decisions. The power of reviews is monumental for any company that seeks its customers online. No matter how good you are, you will receive both good and bad reviews. Responding to them gives you back a measure of control. It delivers a message that you care and allows customers to see that you will fix problems that occurs. How you answer your reviews will paint an image of you to the public. You have the power to make your image a positive one.