Are Guest Reviews The New Frontier for Vacation Rentals?
Vacation rentals have been on a steep learning curve over the last few decades, evolving from a niche category to one of the preferred ways to travel. Booming demand has been great for the industry, but the growth has also attracted a title wave of self-managed rentals. And while travelers have never had more options to choose from, this influx of supply makes it harder for professional managers to showcase their brand and drive direct bookings. So, how can managers use smart guest review strategies to gain a leg up on the competition?
Do Guests Reviews Make a Difference at Booking?
The modern consumer wants to make sure he or she is making a good purchasing decision. This holds true for travelers, as 29% of prospective guests read reviews before booking a place to stay. Those that do read more than 6 distinct reviews before pulling the trigger, spending almost 30-minutes combing through crowdsourced social proof!
Still don’t think your review score moves the needle? One decimal point in average review score equates to more than 5% in average daily rates and 2.8% in booking conversion. In other words, higher review scores not only help you charge more for each reservation, but they increase time spent on your website interacting with your brand, ultimately boosting click-through conversations and driving higher occupancy rates.
Should Managers Respond to the Reviews They Get?
VRMs should always respond to the reviews, feedback, and inquiries that guests leave. Doing so 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.
Believe it or not, 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 killer product. If you ‘wow’ your guests with the way you maintain properties and deliver personalized service, your review scores will follow suit.
Of course, the best managers don’t just hope this happens. The operators who prompt guests to provide feedback receive a review 81% of the time. Many do so by embedding review links within guest communication programs, enabling them to automatically solicit feedback upon check-out.
Then, they push reviews back to their website, reaping the aforementioned benefits of higher searchability and conversion. In fact, 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 is one of your best data sources. There’s a lot of moving pieces though – consolidating your 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 manually processes often ending up chasing their tails.
But when done effectively, best-in-class managers are able to:
Source small issues before they become larger brand risks.
Identify strengths for differentiate marketing campaigns.
Identify brand weaknesses to prioritize and improve.
Help convince owner clients to upgrade certain property details.
Automatically publish 5-star reviews back to websites.
Tie property care and review data together to grade staff performance.
Ready to start leveraging your reviews?
After years of trying to manage tens of thousands of reviews, we built Reva to help others aggregate, report and share their reviews. If you’re interested in transforming your guest review strategy, giving our tools a test drive, or you just want to chat.