If you don’t have mostly 5-star ratings for your Airbnb reviews, you’re leaving money on the table.
Building and achieving a size number of great reviews on your listings can significantly increase your booking rate for your units. Here are some ways to achieve great reviews.
Get Them Early
If you have very few Airbnb reviews for your listing, then your unit will have a hard time achieving bookings. Your goal with a new listing is to build up reviews as quickly as possible during the ramp up phase. Introductory pricing and incentives early on can help you do that.
Ask for Them
For all your guests, especially early on, write glowing Airbnb reviews for them right away. Then kindly request for a review of their stay from them. Just by asking explicitly, you’ll build up your Airbnb reviews much more quickly.
Reviewed as a Guest
By also being a guest on Airbnb, you have an opportunity to get reviews as guest, which helps to build your profile as a real person on Airbnb. The more validation you have from others on the community, the lower the barrier you have to establish trust as a host with your potential new guest.
Plant Seeds for Review Topics
Delight your guests with at least one unique, highly memorable experience that you can be very confident they will mention in their review. Maybe you left them fresh baked cookies for their check in. For another guest, you went out of your way to help them get a reservation at a popular restaurant nearby. Having specific examples can make the Airbnb reviews written about you more believable and memorable for potential guests.
What are other ways to ensure you have great reviews on Airbnb? Share your thoughts below.
What do you do when your host has written a review about you that is…. underwhelming? Our first experience as guests was very important to me as we are also planning on hosting in the next few months. My family and I stayed in a beautiful apartment in Vienna and, as I’m a cleaning-freak, I left the apartment absolutely spotless. The host later commented that the apartment was ‘left in a good shape’ and I found that comment really disappointing as it hadn’t reflected the amount of effort I’d put into making everything sparkle. I had written in her review how much we (as a family) had enjoyed staying in her apartment and she had responded with a review that said, ‘I can only recommend Melissa as a guest.’ She is German and the direct translation of this phrase in German is very positive ‘Ich kann Melissa nür empfehlen.’ But the English translation doesn’t sound as positive, it sounded like she would only recommend me and not the rest of my family! I guess I’m being over-sensitive…?!
It could be that the host didn’t see the house after you left and the generic “left in good shape” is all the host could say. Or, the host simply uses a generic review for most of their guests.
We both work and are not able to make a personal inspection of our house after each guest/group leaves. I check with my cleaning service about how the house was when they arrive but we’re not able to say how clean and tidy a particular person or group left it since we didn’t have a chance to inspect our rental each time.
Make sure when your guests arrive they walk into a clean, well appointed, comfortable, welcoming, up-to-date space with everything available that is in your listing. Also, make sure you respond quickly to any communications from your guests.