When you run your property long enough, you’re bound to get a less than satisfied guest. And you may not be able to prevent a negative Airbnb review despite everything you try. What now? You can use this opportunity to improve your property. We’ll show you how!
Request The Review Be Removed
Before we get started, it’s important to mention that sometimes reviews aren’t helpful. In fact, sometimes guests can leave a bad review despite there being anything wrong.
For example, we had a guest give us a 3 star review because our property wasn’t ADA accessible. They said we didn’t have a shower bar and a couple of other things (I wish I remembered but it got removed so I don’t have a screenshot). Our property isn’t ADA accessible. But here’s the thing: nowhere on our listing did we say that it was. Airbnb has a specific setting you can use to show you are ADA accessible and we specifically did not use it. Because of this, we were able to get the review removed. Don’t be afraid to do the same if you’re in a similar situation!
Now let’s assume you just received a review that you cannot remove. How can we use it to our advantage? There’s two ways: improving your property and providing a thorough response.
Creating A Better Airbnb Property Using Reviews
Whenever you get a review, a guest is able to send both public and private messages. You’ll want to use these to improve your property! For example, one of our guests said that it would have made the place more homely had we added more decorations.
In order to create a more ‘homely’ feeling for the following guests, we purchased some additional items to place throughout the house. A few faux plants, some wall decorations, and small accent pieces did the trick! Following this review we didn’t receive any negative feedback on how our place was decorated.
The review doesn’t have to be bad either. Sometimes it’s the 5 star reviews that contain little nuggets in the private messages that allow you to make improvements. Listen to them and make the decision on how to use it to your advantage!
Asking For Feedback
Now sometimes you’ll receive a negative review without any feedback. On the surface there’s not much you can do. You’ll have a hard time guessing what the guest was thinking. This is where you’ll want to ask for feedback.
Now to be totally transparent, we did not have good results with this despite how much we tried. I’m going to share what we wrote below, but just know that the results weren’t very helpful. This could be due to not having enough people to send it to or the fact that it was a poor way of asking. With that being said, you might as well ask for feedback anyways. The worst that can happen is the guest doesn’t respond!
Hi [GUEST], we want to apologize for not providing you a 5 star experience. We wanted to reach out and see what we can do to improve our place to make it better for next time. Is there anything specific we can improve upon?
Airbnb treats anything less than a 5 star review as a negative review, so we want to make sure we are improving our place to earn 5 stars.
Thank you for your help in advance,
[YOUR NAME]
Once you hear back from the guest, you’ll want to see if there are any updates you can make for the next guest. Sometimes you’ll either get no response or something not helpful. But any nuggets you can take from it will be great for preventing the same review from happening in the future.
Your Public Response Matters
Yes, negative reviews can impact your listing negatively. But, there is a silver lining. They allow guests to see how you handle these situations. When a guest leaves a review, you are allowed to leave a public response.
When a 5 star review is left, you’ll likely leave some niceties and hope they choose your place again.
But when the review is less than 5 stars, you’ll want to dig a bit deeper. What we like to do is thank them for the review, offer a response to what they say, and end with another nice thing such as thanking them again. The important thing here is to respond in a calm manner and be respectful. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with what they say, but you should be nice when explaining things if you feel it was unfair. Check out some of the examples below of how we responded to some less than 5 star reviews.
You can see we thank them for the review, address the issue at hand or explain we PM’d them, and then offer a nice ending sentence. We felt this helped guests to know that we understand their concerns while addressing them. And this also shows future guests that we are reachable and may make mistakes but we aim to remedy them promptly.
Be Better Each Time
Obviously you’ll want to start your property off as complete as possible. But sometimes things get left out. The important thing is to address guest’s concerns and improve with each bit of feedback. And hopefully you can learn from some of our mistakes to skip ahead!