Everybody knows reviews are the key to success in this sharing economy and we all want them. In this guide we will show you strategies to obtain reviews for online directories like Yelp, or Google Business, and even for your properties.
Software
There are several companies that focus their business on helping companies build and manage their reviews. Companies such as ReviewInc and Grade.US are great examples of companies who specialize in review management.
ReviewInc has four different tiers of membership that you can choose from: Monitoring, Premium, Enterprise, and Agency. Monitoring is your basic level of membership for only $39, but you are limited to six features. If you are going to go purchase a membership from ReviewInc, we recommend going with at least the Premium membership, so you can have access to more of the customizable features that ReviewInc offers. If you are a larger business, you should consider getting the Enterprise or Agency level of membership, which will allow you to integrate as many sites as you want and include many more features to help you manage your reviews.
Grade.US is another fantastic review management company that offers a variety of different features to help you get the most out of your reviews. Grade.US can help your company with: reviews acquisition, review request campaigns, review monitoring/aggregation, review marketing, and review reporting. If you aren’t already paying attention to these things, you should highly consider working with Grade.US or another company that can help you re-focus and get the most out of your reviews.
There are also many vacation rental software companies who are developing reputation solutions to configure email triggers to auto send mid-stay and post checkout – something that looks similar to this:
Basic Strategies
One of the easiest ways to acquire new reviews is to utilize the guests who are staying at your properties. If someone is having a great stay at your property, you want to capitalize on his or her happiness and prompt them to leave a review right then and there, instead of waiting until they get home and sending them an email. The way you can do this is by leaving review cards on every property’s nightstand. The most efficient way to do this is by making it a daily routine for your cleaning staff to leave these review cards on every nightstand. In order to increase the chances of your guests seeing the review cards, you should also leave them on the dining room tables and bars in every unit. This way you have review cards in 3 different places in every unit, which triples your chances of your guests leaving reviews. An example of what one of these cards might look like is:
What If A Guest Has A Bad Stay?
There is nothing worse than a bad review. If only there was a way to filter these out… Psst, there is, kind of. Say a guest staying in one of your units has a bad stay and finds your review card on the nightstands. The link on the review card will take your guests to a review pre-qualification page that looks like:
If an unhappy guest chooses thumbs down, it will take them to another page where they can voice their frustrations; instead of allowing them to leave a bad review on your website, it will send an email directly to you, so you can be the one to hear about it and diffuse the situation.
On the contrary, if they had a good stay it, will direct them to a page where they can select a directory to drop a review. You can even add distribution channels like VRBO and make the user select the unit they stayed in.
2nd step after selecting VRBO from the options above.
By creating a flow you can start to build reviews for specific directories and even units to increase the number of good reviews about your management company.
It All Helps
Reviews are king, especially good reviews. They will help SEO, distribution channel reservations, referral reservations, and even increase inventory because owners will see good reviews and be more inclined to work with you.
