Heads In Beds Show - Building The Reputation Of Your Vacation Rental Business With The Right Reviews

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, Paul and Conrad discuss the crucial role of online reviews in the vacation rental business. They dive into which platforms deserve your focus, highlighting the importance of Google reviews for brand search, trust, and SEO. Discover why you should prioritize one review platform at a time for better results and the power of personalized review requests over automated ones.The hosts share valuable insights on handling both positive and negative feedback, emphasizing the dos and don'ts of responding professionally and promptly without getting defensive. Learn when to take conversations offline and why generic responses are a no-go.Paul and Conrad also touch on the significance of review velocity, understanding the different standards of review platforms like Airbnb and Verbbo, and when it might be worth claiming listings on niche sites like Yelp. Finally, they explore the dual impact of reviews on attracting both guests and homeowners and offer a unique tip on how to potentially boost review numbers. Tune in to master your online reputation and turn reviews into a powerful asset for your vacation rental business!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Mr. Manzi, how's it going? What's happening? level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Mr. Manzi, how's it going? What's happening?

Well, as you know, I'm drugged up again. I can't stay healthy. So everybody gets to enjoy part two of Paul not remembering the episode after he records it. This is I it's I'm a bright side. I'm I'm up I've got some energy. We've you know, I feel like it's better than it was six hours ago. I'm up. I've got some energy. You know, I feel like it's better than it was Six hours ago. I I truly was considering when I woke up this morning texting you and saying We might have to push our recording today, but I don't know if it's a second wind I don't know if it's whatever is full inside me or whatever it is But I'm excited to have a fun filled conversation today. How are you doing sir? Well healthier. I hate to admit it, but it is the truth. So I'll just, you know, whenever,

what's the expression? You know, the healthy man wants everything, the unhealthy man only wants one thing. So I'll take my, I took my good health in a positive stride right now, because who knows, tomorrow it could change and I could feel bad or the kids bring home some crud or illness, probably what happened to you and we'll have to go. I'll take the good with the benefits here and try to roll with it for the time being. So this one actually, speaking of things that always happen, a few things always happen. One thing that always happens in every vacational business is reviews. They are a nonstop occurrence, right? Every day, I feel like we have clients who are getting more reviews and it's kind of the lifeblood of our, really of a lot of our

success, certainly in the OTA platform. So we've had this one on the docket for, I don't know, six months or something. I'm looking at the date of when we came up with this idea. You know, I take it back. We wrote this idea into our episode list on July 29th of 2024. According to our little project, we plan this episode on together. And we finally getting to it here in March of 2025. So it's been there for sitting for a while. There was no reason we didn't do it.

It just, I don't know, just didn't seem to find this way to the top of the list. We had other things we were talking about, but I think a key part of, you know, the overall marketing mix is reviews. So we'll kind of set the stage here a little bit. And we'll kind of go to drugged up Paul here in a second. But the thought process today is what reviews actually matter. So what are the platforms that you really want to get reviews on? And what are the situations that pop up with reviews that need, I would say, like a more, you know, a detailed or a more thorough review of that process, meaning like, you know, a crisis occurs, problems happen. How do we handle those reviews when they have,

when, you know, we're having those issues, as well as just like best practices, just like ongoing review best practices. Like I mentioned at the top here, you know, reviews are just ongoing. So like, what is the thing you just do like every day, every week, what's automated to actually get more reviews in your business?

So I think this is an important one. I'm sure Paul, you agree. Let's let's dive into reviews, but anything else you want to add in there before we dive into it? No, I mean, I think that this is online reviews. I think in one of our episodes a couple of months ago, we had referenced something or maybe just a LinkedIn post of some kind. But I mean, reviews are a really important part of people. You know, that third party validation is super important when it comes to booking an accommodation

of some kind. And I do. I think that the number was somewhere between 60 and 80. We'll keep it wide so that I'm going to hit somewhere in there. But about three quarters of people or two thirds of people are actually looking at reviews when they're making that decision. And I think that it's something as simple as, I see it when I look into websites that have Clarity on and they're actually looking through the properties and almost inevitably, and probably the same breakdown, two-thirds or three-quarters of those sessions,

we see people look through the images, look at the dates, and then they scroll down to that review section. So certainly an important part of how you're managing your online reputation. That's something that whether you need to use a yes to figure out how your reviews are coming in or do something like that. I don't want to go that far, but it really is important to understand that,

yeah, we think that typically people are gonna go this path to go to get to make that booking. But there's a lot of places out there where people can either get inspiration or look for rates, dates and rates or do things like that. So knowing where to prioritize those reviews, knowing how to respond to reviews that are both positive and negative. And I think we have some good best practices along the way that we're going to talk about here. So I'm excited. Yeah, I think this is a this is an important topic. So it's it's good. We finally got to it. Maybe it took us too long, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we'll start with the thing that maybe you

and I have spent the most time thinking about more so on in terms of like where to get reviews, you and I are probably big fans of getting more reviews on Google. So Google is obviously where I think the majority of people are going to get see your brand reviews nowadays, honestly, after branded search, which is such an interesting thing. It's so funny how people perceive branded search to work versus how it actually works. There's such a delta between the two. And usually my branded search debate is on PPC, you know, when people when people are like, why do I need a bit on my brand name? That seems so silly. Why am I

spending that, you know, those dollars or those investments on making sure that people search for my brand actually click on my website. And then I show them the data which indicates that, you know, 80 90% of people search for your brand often are not clicking, you. And then I show them the data, which indicates that, you know, 80, 90% of people search for your brand often are not clicking, uh, you know, at the rate that you want them to on your actual website itself, on the actual business listing there. Um, and then you realize your brand search is actually a critical moment.

Like it's that last step before they actually make a reservation, make a booking. And so many people, unfortunately goof this up and mess this up where they have, you know, they, they assume people are going to click through. They assume people are going to go to that review page and see good things there. And of course, that's not always the case. And they just take it for granted. They assume like, Oh, someone searching for name my company is automatically going to do what I want them to do. And nothing to be further from the truth specifically when it comes to reviews,

like when someone searches the name of your company and they click on that reviews tab, we don't know because the clarity sessions you're referring can only happen on the website itself. But I guarantee you, you know, because I know this happens all the time because we have clients that have negative reviews on those platforms, even an overly handful, they might have 100 good reviews and five negative reviews. And you know, a lot of people will reference, hey, I saw a review on your Google My Business profile. And you said that there was, you know, the property wasn't clean. So like, walk me through your cleaning process. Like, how do I know I can trust this? And it doesn't take very many

negative reviews on Google to kind of almost poison someone's mind a little bit, you know, from like a guest perspective. So Google reviews are so important. I think a reasonable target like we have clients that are averaging, you know, four dot five on 100 or 200 reviews, I think that's a reasonable target that pretty much any company could hit. We're going to talk about other platforms in a second. Like we all know Airbnb doesn't have the same review standard, if you will, as other companies. So that's a that's a different system almost. But within the context of Google, I think if you're at four or five or higher, you're probably doing pretty good. And the best way to get there, honestly, is just to push a lot more reviews in. Like it's a different system almost. But within the context of Google, I think if you're at 4.5 or higher, you're probably doing pretty good. And the best way to get there, honestly,

is just to push a lot more reviews in. It's a volume game. We have clients that panic over getting a negative review. And sometimes they're, I read them, and sometimes they're justified, and sometimes they're not. You know what I mean? I've read some stuff where it's like, that's silly. That's not fair.

That client got that review. And I've read stuff where I'm like, you guys goof. You deserve the negative review in that one. Now, what I think does happen more often than not on Google, because almost everybody has a Google, because almost everybody has a Google account, is this idea of like a whole group of people is unhappy. This seems to happen more with our larger property managers and everybody from the

group will leave a negative review. Right. So it's like they might've messed up one time and maybe they deserve one negative review for their goof. But then it's like there was nine people in that in that group that felt, you know, slighted and they go and leave nine separate reviews. Hey, we stayed, we booked with company XYZ and then you end up getting 10 negative reviews off one goof, which is obviously a little bit hard. It's like you need to get, you know, 15 more happy guests

actually get 10 more positive reviews to kind of offset that. But yeah, long story short, I think Google is where there's the most SEO value there. It's going to help you a lot on brand search, which I think is an underutilized part of this whole, you know, direct booking strategy. And I think ultimately, it's going to build trust conversions and social proof. I have this LinkedIn post about the Picasso review page and how I think that's such a well-done page on the homeowner side.

I think the same logic applies both on homeowner and guest. You want a lot of reviews so people can't dispute that you are what you say you are, that you deliver on what you say you're going to deliver. And when you go on a brand page and you see 1,000 Google reviews and they're all five stars, that's a really high trust-building signal. So that would be mine, Google reviews. You can't go wrong, you know, that's a really high trust building signal. So that would be mine Google reviews, you can't go

wrong, I think focusing on Google reviews for sure. But no, I think it's timely. I did the quick search while you were talking and I found because Rand Fishkin had was is presenting this morning or probably over in Europe. So afternoon, evening, whatever it is. But one of his stats was 31% of keywords and 44% of searches on Google are people searching for brands. Right.

It's a big, big number. Why would someone search for a brand on Google? It's like, it's often to look at reviews or look at additional information on the about the business, right? So you shouldn't take that for granted. You should be optimizing that and not assume they're just gonna click your website.

Like that's such a fallacy. People say that to me all the time and it's just not true. I think it is. And I think that that's something that Google, they want someone to find the right answer. But that is clear. Whether that answer comes on some other website, or whether it comes within the Google ecosystem. Certainly, we're screaming more towards the Google ecosystem. So it's

something that I also have told people often that optimizing your Google Business profiles, like optimizing your business, your Facebook business page, I mean, it's the same type of business asset. And I think from a review standpoint, from an online reputation standpoint, it's more important because it is Facebook people are going to look for your pictures. There's reviews there. And there's there's things like that. But it's but you can hide the reviews on Facebook.

It is you can you can, you can kind of pull the wool over there. But on the Google side of hide the reviews on Facebook. You can kind of pull the wool over there. But on the Google side of things, it is I mean, you have, especially if you have meta search of some kind, implemented into the into your your distribution strategy, you are you're going to have opportunities for the OTA is to be pushing your your rates right on that Google business listing or kind of a subset or a sub page of that. So we've talked often over the last six,

eight months about the importance of Google versus AI in Google search and how you shouldn't be second guessing that. The business profile, it really is. And you should see it as an extension of your website. And if something isn't representative of your brand and your business on your Google business profile, if it were on your website, you change it. If it's on your Google business profile, you need to change that immediately, make the update and make sure that people are seeing whatever they need to see, so that they can get to your website, that beautiful direct

booking website and and ultimately make it down to that. Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. Well, one other thing I'll touch on when it comes to Google is that I just it I couldn't agree more. One other thing I'll touch on when it comes to Google is that I just it's so funny to call ahead just before this was with a client who's been in business for a long time since 2005. And he's only got 40 reviews on Google My Business, they're good reviews, which is a plus. But I said, hey, client name, I'm like, we obviously

haven't been focusing a lot on Google reviews. We've only got 40 in, you know, 15. I don't know when he verified his Google My Business profile. So I don't know, I shouldn't assume they're too much. But long, long story short, he's been in business for a long time. It doesn't have a lot of reviews. And he's kind of getting overtaken by like a young company who has been around for like a year or two, and already has like 50 or 60 reviews.

I'm like, well, imagine that from someone new from their perspective, they see your company, they see this new company who's upstarting and they see a lot more reviews on their profile than your profile, they might assume they might think that like that actual business is actually doing better or bigger than you. They may not know that you're actually been in business much longer.

So we're going to focus on getting more reviews, and I think that'll help us cause a little bit. But one thing I just wanted to press here at the end on Google is that review velocity matters. So I think you don't want to ever let it go a long period of time where you get no reviews, even if you have good ones. You just don't want to let it sit there

stagnant for a long time, you wanna keep pushing it, which actually leads me to a key point that I put in the outline here that I wanna get to, which is that I think what a lot of people do when we talk about all these platforms is they go, okay, great, what I'm gonna do in my post departure email is I'm gonna put a link to Google, I'm gonna put a link to, if they booked on an OTA,

maybe I can link that, I'm gonna put a link on Yelp and Better Business Bureau and Facebook and all these things, don't do that. People aren't gonna do it. What I think you should do, most people need to focus on, is one platform at a time. And you can do this in seasons. You could say, like, alright, in the spring, or for the next two months, I'm just going to focus on Google, let me try to get more Google reviews.

Then you might take that link off or remove that call to action in your review email, and then focus on Facebook for a month or two at a time. Then maybe you need a few more views on other platforms. Maybe you do want some on Yelp, for example. We'll talk about Yelp in a second. Maybe you could focus on that for a month and then come back to Google. Hey, now it's been a few months since we've done Google. Let's go ahead and push more into Google

for the next few months. So don't do like the classic, what's the test where it's like, I think we told the story before, woman goes to farmer's market with 50 cents of candles, sells no candles, come back to next week with three candles, sends the candles and sells 50 candles, right? So like don't overwhelm people with like, hey,

leave us a review and 10 different platforms, people aren't going to do that, you're going to do well to get a person a person leave you one review on one platform. So like, just swap them out just every few months, you know, change it out every month, change it out. And then that way, you're kind of sharing the love a little bit between platforms. So I don't know if you've done that. But that's kind of something I've recommended for for some time.

Oh, absolutely. I think that that's something that I saw some people using kind of a byproduct of the Victoria CRM. And it was obviously they were still working about owner leads, but they were using it to push a lot of reviews out and a lot of the you know, a lot of the requests for to send a review. And if you have a system in place, and doesn't, you know, CRM, whatever that is, some type of operational system where whatever that cadence is, seven days post day, two weeks post day, a month post day, something like that. But really making sure you're retouching those guests

and continuing the marketing. This is ongoing marketing, the 101 that we would recommend regarding this. But on the review side of things, to be able to reach out like that and consistently get, I mean, I think they were pulling in like 10 reviews a week. And it was it was really impressive to see. Now I think if we if we looked at their Google Business profile today, I think they're, when they started, they were at zero, and I think they're up to 400 or 500. So it's, again, you got to have the stays, you got to have positive, you got to be delivering that positive experience. But if you were consistently delivering that positive experience, this is where maybe you might have different feelings here. I don't think it's taboo to reach out consistently for that review. Even if people are saying, oh, at some

point along the lines, maybe they aren't going to fill it out or they're not going to do something like that. Or it might be probably, you know, it's frustrating them with the volume or the velocity of requests they're getting. But ultimately, if you gave them a good experience, I think you were well within your rights as a business, as a brand to try to get them to talk about that. As someone who doesn't like sending those out for positive feedback, it is. Maybe this is the Minnesota Midwestern, something in me. But working with a lot of the small companies up here in Northern Minnesota, small fishing lodges and stuff like that, they had that feeling of, well, I don't want to push them to give me a review. If they want to give me a review, they should just want

to give me a review because I did such a good job. Yes, that's true. They should want to give you, but they may not have the understanding of how to do it. They may not know the process. What's the expression like quiet kid gets no candy or something like that? Exactly. Squeaky wheel gets no oil. Go down that list. But I do. I think that that's something where, I mean, you shouldn't feel bad about asking someone for it. Now again, if you gave someone a terrible experience and you don't know, sure, I can understand not wanting or having that unknown of not wanting to

send them out in mass because of that because because you know that you might get a negative with a positive but I think that's the key is don't let the fear of a negative review stop you from pushing to get more positives. But maybe that's kind of the takeaway there of you're going to get a negative review that is inevitable at some point along the lines, whether it's, you know, justified or not, justified or not, whether it was mother nature doing something ridiculous to you,

you're going to have a negative review. So don't again, let's buffer that give yourself some flexibility, give yourself some equity built in and have push for more of those positive views. You're dealing with the general public, right? So like, you know, the distribution of people and you deal with enough guests, at some point, there's going to be one guest that you're going to find that's very much on the jerk scale, right? There are level 10 on the jerk scale. It is just a simply matter of time before that happens. Now do some budget clients tend to attract more of the jerks for whatever reason than more high end clients? I think so. Like I've noticed that which is kind of a funny thing. And we have clients that worked in the past who start by managing very low end inventory.

And then over time they scale their business and they begin to attract more high quality inventory. And I hear the same thing a lot, which is like, man, I actually get fewer complaints from the $1,000 a night place than I do from the $200 a night place, which always blows my mind, but I think it's very true. There's a lot of truth in that statement of the quality of guests you're looking for and the quality of home you manage certainly comes through in reviews.

And if you go on Airbnb and you sort by a lowest night, ascending price-wise, you'll see some properties that are charging a much lower rate that are pretty mediocre reviews, but hey, it's a big space and people are booking it because they want the space and they don't want to pay much. And you can kind of see that in the review side of things. So I think there's a lot to be said on that side. Let's run through a few more platforms here. So just to kind of hit some different concepts here, Airbnb and Verbo Booking.com, obviously, these are platforms where they're going to send the review request, right? It's not often up to

you. They're the ones going to send the review request there. I do like Airbnb's double blind system. I'll give them some credit on that one. That is a good way of doing it to prevent this retaliatory, you know, review thing that can happen. Oh, you left me a bad review. Therefore, boom, I'm going to get you back the other way and leave you a negative review. It kind of reminds me of eBay, you know, in a way eBay you have this this double review system where I'm the buyer, I'm the seller, I leave feedback on both sides. I think that was more of a thing in the old days of eBay where like the buyer's credibility mattered more. Nowadays, it's like if you pay it, like I can't imagine there's many issues that pop up there at the guest side or on the on the buyer side. But for Airbnb on the

guest side, you know, the one thing that doesn't make any sense though is like, if I as a guest get a bunch of negative reviews in a row, to my knowledge, I could be wrong, maybe a host could correct us on this. There's not much I can do to prevent that person from booking if they have a negative review. So if I if I'm a host, and I'm letting you stay in my million dollar beachfront house and you have a two-star review on Airbnb and I'm like, oh, Paul seems like a pretty troubling guest. Maybe I shouldn't let him stay. I don't think there's much you can do about that, which kind of feels in a way pointless. I guess it's good to know that a train wreck is about to happen, but you still are sitting there strapped to the tracks. So I don't know if that's the best thing there, but there's

some upside there. But going back to that comment I made earlier about Airbnb just having a totally different system. I've shared this with friends and family members and things like that. Basically on Airbnb, when you see four dot, just ignore the four. It's basically the number you see the 4.35, like that's a 35. That's a pretty bad review on Airbnb.

Go look at 4.85, pretty good. 4.95, really good. 4.99, ridiculous, right? Awesome. Probably gonna have a great experience if you got a lot of reviews not listening. But I will say one thing that I've done recently, this was a discussion on the Art of Hospitality podcast

recently with Tanya, she talked a lot about value, getting a poor rating in the value category. And she's like, well, that's value is completely subjective. So if I gave you a clean place that was professionally managed, my communication was excellent, it was as pictured, as described, you were happy with the stay,

and then you give me 5554, you know, on value, how is that fair to me? Like, you paid it it like, you know, like, I didn't force you to make that booking, right. So I will say when I go and look at Airbnb listing, sometimes I will look at the value category. And if someone yesterday where the value was like a four dot five, everything else was like four dot nine or five. And I'm like, how's that the host fall? Why are they getting a lower rating of value because value is very subjective. And it was run by a professional property manager who I'm sure was maximizing his yield and charging him a lot of money per night.

That's exact. Yeah, so it's like, I'd be like, sorry you paid $400 a night and you didn't think it was worth that, but like you paid it, it's as described. That one I have a little bit more of a hard time with. So if I was booking an Airbnb, quote Airbnb for a friend or friendly member,

and I saw a low rating on value, I wouldn't let that paint my judgment. But certainly if I saw a low rating on something like cleaning or like host communication or something, I might be a little bit more negative about it. So that's kind of my feedback there. Verbo is more of a way I think Verbo has like more of a 10 star system or something like that. Their rating seems to be a little bit more diverse in how they do it. But, you know, I don't know as much about the Verbo rating system. I don't hear people that we work with on the Verbo side have

these like horrifying stories of like, oh, no, I got a negative review and I'm toast, you know, like on Airbnb, it seems to be a little more resilient. But we have some clients I'm looking at an example listing right now, I was looking at yesterday, we have a 9.8 out of 10, and all these reviews seem very positive. So I don't have as much to share on the Verbo side. But what's your experience there? You've kind of done both. I know on both platforms, what's your thoughts?

I think you focus on, you should have some understanding of where your revenue is coming in. So if you have more revenue, if you're 80-20 split on the OTAs, Airbnb versus Verbo, you should be focusing those reviews on the Airbnb side of things. I think, I haven't heard a whole lot of horror stories of Verbo. You see people that have a bad experience here and there. But I think the other side of it is you just don't have as many people using Virbo or you're getting those under the

Expedia window or something. I feel like that's something where it's not, maybe doesn't feel like it's as directly aligned there. Think about back to five, six, maybe 10 years ago where TripAdvisor was the only spot you were going to look for reviews or to plan the trip. Now that's one where I don't even think there are a whole lot of vacation rental managers that have a profile set up on TripAdvisor. Same thing with Yelp, same thing with Booking.com. Oh, Booking.com, you're right. But the TripAdvisor and the Yelp, those were fundamental as far as the trip planning process at some point until Google came in with Google Travel. So I do, I think that the overall you

still want to focus most of your time and effort on the Airbnb and Google side of things. Verbo certainly if you're taking more of your reservations through there but what and we've talked about it. What always concerns me about some of these niche sites, the TripAdvisors and the Yelp's is that when Google does make an update and they start to push more AI overviews or some different, you know, structure, featured snippets, structured snippets, structured data, stuff like that, inevitably TripAdvisor and Yelp are always the ones that benefit

in those little small tests. It's just something to keep in mind in the back of your mind of you. I don't think you want to leave them completely You want to you want to have your placement there you want to have your listing of record you want to own it You don't want someone to come in and claim it underneath you and do something like that I think that's that's the other side of it as well But you want to make sure that at any point, I think when we were using Yext at TravelNet, there were 75 different sites that Yext was reviewing to see, do you have listings there? Is the data, is the meta information accurate to your business? Do you have the right business

address? Do you have the right business address? Do you have the right phone number? Do you have the right email website? All that stuff. Do you need to go out and do all 70 of those sites? No, but I think it's important to make sure that if there's a listing or a profile out there that you're not attached to, that's a problem because someone might look there. This is one of those, I would say, a winter activity or a summer activity in a mountain market. But going through and doing the due diligence of checking your online reputation, doing those branded searches and seeing what comes up in the first page, two pages, three pages of Google and Bing, and then understanding, do I own that profile? Are there good reviews? Are there

bad reviews? What's happening there? It is maybe a spring cleaning type of thing. That's what we'll put together, a spring cleaning episode of things you can do as you're heading into the busy season. But I think that as a best practice, you should know what's happening comprehensively. But we know where the focus needs to be to get the most,

where the most juice is gonna come from the squeeze there. Yeah, I guess I feel the same way about using those review platforms as I feel about channel distribution, which reminds me of the Darm Conversation, I have the key data dashboard, where basically they said in summary, Airbnb direct bookings, Verbo and booking.com represent,

it was like 97% or 98% of the market share of where you're getting bookings from, at least according to their data set last year. So therefore, if you go spend all this effort, time and energy on the next 10 listing sites after that, the next 20, the next 30, because God knows there's so many of them, maybe you will see a lift, but it'll likely be less than those numbers represent, right? Like for most people, they're not going to be getting more than a few percentage points at most of bookings outside of those four areas, direct Airbnb, verbal booking.com. But you know, there's differences, each market's a little different.

You might want to do more research into your market and kind of see what's possible there. But I feel the same way about reviews, right? Like between the OTA platforms, Google, Facebook, there's not much there. Like Yelp, does Yelp get traffic? Yes. I know the one kind of counterpoint you made to me when we were putting this outline together was that Yelp is often referenced in AI overviews. And it's referenced a lot in some of those searches. So, you know, what we kind of landed on is like, I think it makes a lot of sense to claim your Yelp and like better business bureau pages, they're probably going to exist, you may as well go and

claim them. I think, you know, Yelp's for whatever reason, just seems to be a magnet for negative reviews, waste more so than positive reviews. I also think Yelp is kind of like, like low key, just a really dishonest company, like I've had a lot of weird and negative interactions with their team on the sales side, where they're like, sure, our review package. And like, basically, they suppress negative reviews and pay them money. That's my take on it. So I wouldn't I wouldn't be bullish on Yelp as

far as like, I'm gonna go pay money to them to like, for these racket protection fees. That being said, though, again, it may be like a season where you're like, all right, if I just go get 10, 15, 20 positive reviews on Yelp, and then I get a negative one or two, again, it's like, you've got some armor on your body and then like it hits you an arrow hits you. It's like kind of, you know, it kind of just glances off you, right? Like it doesn't actually go into your flesh and kill you. That's kind of how I feel about review scores. When you get a bunch of positive ones, the negative

ones are just not going to impact you as much. So if it was me, I would have a hard time focusing on Yelp at our business bureau at all, really. I would be focused mostly on Google and then of course doing within my platform reviews there and kind of focused focused on that and then Facebook being a secondary one there. I will say this isn't the case anymore since the Vtrips acquisition, but when I was working with my Carrington's company a few years ago, they were using TrustPilot, I think was the name of the service they were using. They had reviews embedded on the website from TrustPilot and it was basically a third party system.

I did like that. At the time, it was also a little benefit to get like the review markup on Google ads. So we could actually see like the review score and they did a really good review score. His company did at that time. So I liked that. I learned how much it costs though.

And I don't know if it's worth it for most small companies. I think it was a bit larger. And so in his, you know, in his expense thing, it wasn't massive, you know, line item. But if you're a small company, I would have a harder time recommending Trustpilot. Not that it's a bad service. It was just very expensive, I think,

for what we got out of it. I think you're better off just having some review system on your own website. Do you have any experience with that one? Or what's your thoughts there? I was gonna say TrustPilot is one that I've seen be more effective on the B2B side. It is. I think when you're trying to, and software sales, and just the general marketing services, that was one where that was a little more important or on a directory site where you are comparing. So those are the two kind of the experiences that we had. We had Trustpilot on resorts and lodges.com for a while. So that was something that I think it was coming through. And again, it is another third party validation point of,

okay, Trustpilot's got me at a 71. It's got this next one at a 43, it's got this. So it's a stack rank, a visual-assessed stack rank. And I think that's where, like, if you are, if you're just, you know, if you were going down and you were able to get them down to the property level, maybe there's some value there, but I don't even think you want to go there because then you're going to, I think the other side of

all of this is that you've got homeowners that own those homes. You don't necessarily, while they are not participating in the review process, I would be shocked if the average property owner saw negative reviews coming into their property on either on your website or anywhere else, you're probably going to get an email, a phone call of some kind to say, hey guys, what's happening? This is not going to work for me here. So I think that's the other thing is like with anything you're doing on the review side, just make sure that it's not just you. And obviously you're the business runner. People are putting their property in your hands and blah, blah, blah. You can go down that road, but think about the the the homeowner as well and those relationships that you are going to have to

Maintain repair men do all those things and and just think about that as well Yeah, now couldn't agree more and I think that um, the reviews definitely do serve both purposes I think and i've said this before so we'll just kind of repeat it here again to hammer the point home A lot of a lot of owners look deep, like with a lot of detailed guest review information. They look a lot at guest marketing when they're making their decisions. So it speaks back to this. Actually, we did a webinar yesterday with Michelle Marquis, and we talked a

lot about the marketing side of homeowner and the sales side of homeowner. And I said on the marketing side, I'm like, look, you know, I've talked about this at length before anyone could put any claim on a postcard, right? It's almost like, um, there's some line, I forget the movie, but there there's a I think it's the one where it's oh, there's gonna bother me He he gets like arrested for killing this guy and long story short It's like it's not what you know, it's what you can prove in court. Jamie Foxx isn't it? That's gonna bother me This was off the cuff. We didn't put it now line as you can tell But um, that's kind of how I feel about social proof or like any kind of review proof

It's like it's not what you know Like you may know you deliver a good service and you know 99% of your guests are happy and you may do a good job. Some of what you know is what you can prove to the public. Some of what you can prove to someone new who is like, oh yeah, this company must do a good job. They have 500 Google reviews that are 4.8 star.

They have 1,000 reviews on Airbnb, 4.9 star, right? Those are the things you can prove a little bit more legitimacy. When you say you're great, that's one thing. When someone else says you're great, that weight carries so much more strength in that person's mind. And I think that's the one thing

that reviews do for you at a high level. It's a psychological bias we all have. It's this lean that we all have as people to go, yeah, I'm a little skeptical of you saying you're great. I'm sure it's your company. You're always gonna say it's great. What do other people say? And when we see it on the review side,

that's when things really, I think, shift ahead and move forward. A few other things here that we didn't quite hit on yet that maybe we should. We didn't talk about personalized versus automated. A few other things here that we didn't quite hit on yet that maybe we should, we didn't talk about personalized versus automated. So again, another thing that came up recently, this is the case, I don't have a massive sample size here, I've asked a few clients

and I kind of did some digging on a few ones that we have access to. It seems to be with the automated reviews, you're doing pretty good to get maybe 10 to 20% of people to respond to that request. But we have a few clients that are doing manual review requests or more personalized review requests.

And first of all, you can tell instantly in the communication if it's automated or if it's personal, right? Like automated review emails, we all know what they look like and we just don't have time, right? We're going through our email inbox, we're going through whatever inbox that we're processing. And it's like, you know, I had a vacation experience a while ago, about a year ago today was when me, my wife and I had that trip to Italy. And like the W was the hotel we stayed at, great experience.

And they sent a very standard automated review request after. I was in the plane home, you know, we had this 10 days there, we had at great experience and they sent a very standard automated re-request after. I was in the plane home, you know, we had this 10 days there, we had a great time and I skipped over it. Maybe I shouldn't have, I almost feel bad about it. But I clicked, you know, I clicked, oh yeah, I'll get to it later. And of course I didn't do it,

even though I did have a great time and I would leave them a five-star view. It was a great place to stay and run there. But it's just this thing where it's like when it's automated, it's one thing. Now, when the concierge that helped us book like for the restaurants, reached out via WhatsApp to my wife, like a day later, and said, Hey, you know, we know, I hope you guys made it back home safely to the States. Vicenzo here, we're so happy to

help you during your stay here. Would you mind leaving us a review? Then we felt bad by not leaving her. Oh, man, well, Vicenzo asked us, we should probably, you know, leave a review on that. Like, so it's worked on me. I know for a fact, it works on most guests, right? Which is when it's a personal review. Hey, Paul, I hope, Paul, I know you and your family, your two boys had a great time up here at our lodge. If you wouldn't mind, would you be able to leave us a review? Here's the link.

If anything didn't go to your plans, let me know. And I'm happy to make it right, dash owner, whatever the owner's name is, right? A message like that sent via, by the way, sent via SMS, instead of being sent via email is a lot. And also not designing the email. So that email that goes out is a plain text email, right? That's a very powerful thing that we've leveraged quite a bit with

clients. And that goes from a 10 or 15% review mark to a 30 or 40% review mark as far as like acceptance of that from there. Now it's up to you if you want to do follow ups, you know, we have a client, this is the real hook, by the way, this is the real sauce. We have a client who incentivizes his reservations department. It's like a block every day. I think it's like an hour every day. All right, we're not focused on new business for this hour. You know, don't worry about that. Try

to get your follow ups or quotes out people there. And honestly, the reservations job has gotten slimmer down scope wise over the past two years. Certainly from when I started today, it's vastly different. I want you to spend an hour reaching out to all the past guests, recent past guests and getting them to leave a review if they haven't already. And I'll give you 10 or whatever it is 10 or 20 bucks for every five star you get. Look at the motivation that gets fired into a reservations department. When you make that offer, I've seen it in person actually once or twice, which is always entertaining.

And they start going into aggressive follow up mode. Wait, you're telling me I can make a dozen calls. I get five reviews and you're going to pay me 100 bucks extra just for the next hour on top of what I'm already getting. You'll see reservations kick their tails in the gear on that kind of stuff. Right. So I think that's a really powerful hook, which is can I personalize it and can I make it beneficial to the people on my team asking to get some additional dollar value associated with it. So that's a really powerful one. The last one, this one I haven't done yet. This is

an Alex Hormozi thing. You know, I like reading some of his stuff, which is let the manager ask on someone else's behalf. So it would be like, let's pretend that, you know, we're in a company, I work for Paul, Paul's the owner of the company. So I go and deal with someone and I say, Hey, hope you had a great stay. Everything's awesome. You know, at some point your manager, my manager might ask you for a review. And if you guys leave me review, it really does help me out. Like if you say my name in the, in the review, it helps me out a little bit. You know, it helps my review and they go, okay, that's fine.

You have to leave a good review. If Paul then reaches out from his account or does an email or an SMS to, you know, thing, Hey, Paul here, owner of Paul's awesome cabin rentals, uh, always looking for feedback on how my team is doing. If Connor did a great job for you, would you mind leaving him a five star review here, it's now someone else asking my behalf and they feel like they're helping me out by you asking. So it's actually this like triangle of, you know, personalities that actually seems to, it's a really compelling idea. I haven't tested that yet,

but I'm very curious to have like, I'm going to say it's fake because like it's a legit email, but like an email from the CEO, like, Hey, how's my team doing? Like, did my team satisfy you? If not, click reply goes to my email. I'd love to help you out. And if they did do a good job, I'd love to hear about it. I love, always love to hear my team is helpful. And I think most people in that situation know what it's like to be that in that situation, they know what it's like to be in a team, and then your boss is evaluating your work. And if you can say, Oh, you hired the right guy, you know, this guy

Connor, he took care of us, he did a great job. Paul, you did a fantastic job, you know, hiring this guy, it's actually a win win on both sides. I feel good about it. The guest feels good about it. You obviously feel good, you're getting your review. So that's a fun one. I haven't tried yet, but I'm interested in that one. Well, I think it really does. I mean, it's the identification of constructive criticism. It feels like you're not asking for a review. You're asking for that constructive criticism that can be used to do X, Y, and Z down the road. But that is, I'm going to jump into just the negative side of things

because that's the thing we've touched on, but they're going to happen. We've talked about that. So where we plugged in the outline here, they gave us some clear do's and don'ts. And generally speaking, I think these are pretty solid. When we're talking about responding to a negative review, obviously do respond promptly and professionally. Don't get defensive or argumentative. We've all seen it. We've all seen that one. I don't need to go down that one. Do acknowledge the guest's concerns and apologize even if you don't fully agree. That is important. Don't ignore negative reviews. Don't just let them sit out there because again,

if you've responded to the positives and you're ignoring the negatives, well, someone's gonna probably see that and have some questions for you. Do take the conversation offline if needed. And I think as an industry, we do pretty well at that. Here's my contact information, here's my phone number, here's my email address. Please feel free to contact me and we'll do whatever we can to resolve that. So I have seen that pretty frequently. From the same vein, don't use canned responses, personalize each reply. Don't just say, Hey, we're, we're, we're sorry

to hear you had a bad time. We this, you know, boilerplate boilerplate, please reach out if you have any additional questions. Always the same. Again, that's there. There is there's there's the expectation of that's no longer a human communicate. I mean, it's human, I guess you're talking human to human, but it feels like it was AI or a robot of some kind. And that's not what we're looking for here. I mean, this is still the review side of this is still very personal. I think maybe that's the other thing. And the other don't that's not included here is, you know, personalize your responses, but don't take it personally. And it's really difficult to do that because in a lot of cases,

you know, for some of these smaller managers, maybe they own the homes, maybe they, you know, it is their business, it is a big part of them personally and professionally. So I think it is very easy to get to take it personally, especially if your name's on it too. It's a really tough tone to strike because you have to be like, in a way, unemotionally detached, but then also empathetic at the same time where you're like, I care about the feedback you're giving me because you can get so detached where you're just like, oh man, you're leaving a mirror view, whatever, right? And you could just be aloof about it. So I think that's really hard part is like, I'm detached from like you being really upset,

but I'm also listening to you and I'm looking at you and I'm caring about you or I'm on the phone. Like I've seen that conversation happen too, you know, in a vacation office before. And it's like, it's a very delicate tone, you got to get them to laugh and crack a joke a little bit, right. But you can't just be flipping and pretend you don't care at all because then you're you're just going to throw gasoline on a fire, you know, so it's really tricky to do.

It needs a very specific personality type to handle these kind of situations. Yeah. Oh, exact. At any time, anytime there is that negative review, try to find some of the positive there. There should be some constructive criticism in there of some kind. You should be able to take uber negative thing and say, okay, let's take this up a level, a high level.

They just weren't happy with X, Y, and Z. They were also really pissed about this stuff down here too. But at a high level, how we can use this to benefit the business is we're going to improve our cleaning. We're going to improve our cleaning, we're going to improve our check-in process, we're going to improve operationally here and there. And I think that's the thing is that if you're not doing some type of with all of the AI, that's the one thing I think AI has done very well is that you can upload 500 reviews and you can have it break down, show some themes, show some commonality.

Where are we seeing the most positivity? Where are we seeing the most negativity? And sometimes the positivity is not about the property, it's about the people, right? Like I've seen that over and over again. You know, like, hey, which name comes up most often in my reviews? Oh, it's Marcus.

Well, Marcus is amazing. You know, I would do anything. You know, Marcus is the man. He helped us three times, you know, throw up my stay, that kind of stuff. So I think that's super valuable, you know. That's,. That's it is. It's so important to be able to, and it is, especially if you have volume, if you're, if you have dozens of reviews, maybe then that's, you can go through and do it on your own. But if you are getting everything done on your, you know,

make sure that we're taking care of that. And, and the other side is, you know, no one to dispute a review, no one not to dispute a review. There's going to be times where if it is false information, policy violations, things like that, you are going to want to reach out to Google Airbnb, Verbo, whoever that is and say, try to explain the situation. Now it might not get you the outcome you're looking for, but that is certainly something that's part of the process

of a negative review is, do you not dispute it? Or do you, is a response going to dispute it or do you, you know, is a response going to be enough or do you need to take it to the next? Yeah, two quick stories and then I know we're up against the time wise here. So first is I have a client who has a really large beachfront property and people get close enough to it

where it triggers a Google My Business, like leave a review about this property even though people aren't staying there. So they get reviews all the time where it's like, beach is awesome, it looks nice, which is good. We get the five stars, But then we get one or two stars sometimes where it's like got scammed by the jet ski operator in front of the speech. This is a client we have in

Jamaica, by the way. So it's like a very large Long Beach, and their property is huge. So that's a fun one to like get negative reviews. And I'm like, they didn't stay here. Like they shouldn't leave a review on this particular listing. So that's fun. We try to get them removed, we seem to have like a 10% success rate on it. Second story is that I know a lot of property managers I've worked with that wait for the demand, the unreasonable demand from the guest in writing

because then they can go later to that person and say, this person said they're gonna leave me a negative review if I didn't give them a refund. There you go, Mr. Airbnb caseworker or Mrs. Airbnb caseworker, whatever the case may be, here's them this text, go check it out. And then all of a sudden, if they do leave a negative review,

it gets popped off very quickly. So when you get someone to make a threat in written form, the lawyers are clapping in the background, like, got him. We got him. So, all good. Well, that's all the thoughts on reviews. If you made it all the way to the end, of course this is gonna be it, Paul.

We need a review. So go to your podcast app of choice, click five stars, Spotify and iTunes. We super duper appreciate that, obviously. A review about a reviews episode will be just a delightful form of entertainment for Paul and I. Just perfect.

So we thank you and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.