How to Improve Hotel Reviews and Guest Ratings

Where hotel reviews come from

Guests leave reviews in several places, and each one reaches a different audience at a different moment of the booking decision. An owner should know which platforms matter for the hotel and who reads them, because a complaint that appears on all of them at once usually points to a real problem inside the hotel.

The main sources are:

• Online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Booking.com and Expedia, which usually invite guests to review after a completed stay and show the score next to the price.
• Google, where reviews on the hotel’s business profile appear in search and on maps, often before the guest visits any booking site.
• Travel review sites and forums, where guests write longer reviews and other travelers compare hotels before choosing.
• The hotel’s own feedback: comments at the front desk, in-stay messages, post-stay surveys and the complaints log. These are not public, but they often show a problem before it reaches a public review.

Find the operational causes behind repeated complaints

One bad review can be bad luck. The same complaint repeated across several guests and platforms is a process that is not working. Collect reviews and internal feedback in one place, sort each complaint by theme and department, and look for the ones that come back. For each recurring theme, ask why it happens until the answer is something the hotel can change: a schedule, a standard, a piece of equipment, a training gap or a description online.

The same complaint can have different causes in different hotels, so treat the following as starting points to check, not as answers:

• Room not ready at check-in: housekeeping schedules that do not match arrival times, or room status not updated between housekeeping and the front office.
• Cleanliness: no room inspection routine, too few housekeeping staff on busy days, or missing cleaning standards for bathrooms and linen.
• Air conditioning, hot water or Wi-Fi: no preventive maintenance plan, and faults reported by guests but not logged and followed up.
• Noise: street-facing rooms, thin windows or doors, or a room allocation that puts light sleepers next to the lift.
• Room smaller or older than expected: photos and descriptions online that do not match the room the guest receives.
• Unfriendly or slow service: understaffed shifts, weak handover between shifts, or staff who were never trained on how to handle a complaint.

Service recovery during the stay

Many negative reviews are written about problems the hotel knew about, or could have known about, while the guest was still in the building. A guest whose problem is solved quickly and politely is more likely to leave a fair review than one who felt ignored. Recovery should be a trained routine, not left to the personality of whoever is on shift.

Management sets what each level of staff may offer without approval, such as a room change, a repair within a set time or a courtesy item. A gesture is a way to put things right, and it must never be conditional on a review. A simple routine looks like this:

• Ask: a short check with the guest after arrival or on the first morning, in person or by message, catches problems early.
• Listen and apologize for the experience without blaming another department or the guest.
• Fix the problem, or offer a realistic alternative, and tell the guest when it will be done.
• Follow up to confirm the fix worked.
• Log the case, the cause and the action, so the pattern shows up when complaints are reviewed.

Asking for reviews within each platform’s rules

Satisfied guests often do not write a review unless they are reminded, while unhappy guests are more likely to write without being asked. A fair, consistent request to every guest brings in more reviews and a more accurate picture of the hotel. OTAs usually send their own review invitation after checkout, so the hotel’s role there is mainly to deliver a good stay and a polite reminder.

Rules differ from one platform to another and change over time, so check each platform’s current review guidelines before setting up any request process. Practices that are commonly prohibited include fake reviews, reviews written by staff, owners or their relatives, discounts, gifts or other rewards offered in exchange for reviews, and, on some platforms, asking only the guests who seem happy. Breaking the rules can lead to removed reviews and penalties on the listing. Approaches that are usually acceptable, subject to each platform’s rules, include:

• Asking every guest in the same way at checkout, without pressure.
• A short thank-you message after the stay with a link to the hotel’s Google profile or another platform that allows it.
• A card or code at reception that leads to the review page, where the platform permits it.
• Training staff to ask naturally, never to suggest a score or to watch the guest write the review.

Replying to reviews, good and bad

Replies are written as much for future guests as for the guest who wrote the review. A calm, specific reply to a complaint shows that the hotel listens and fixes things; an angry or copied reply does the opposite. Decide who replies, usually the general manager or a person trained to write in the hotel’s voice, and reply within a few days. Never share a guest’s personal or booking details in a public reply. Where a review breaks a platform’s rules, use that platform’s reporting process instead of arguing in public.

A reply to a positive review can be short: thank the guest for staying and for writing, mention one specific thing they praised so the reply does not read like a template, pass the praise to the team concerned, and invite them back.

A reply to a negative review needs more care. It can follow this structure:

• Thank the guest for staying and for the feedback.
• Apologize for the specific experience, without excuses.
• Explain the facts briefly and politely, without contradicting the guest point by point.
• Say what has been done to fix the problem, only if it has really been done.
• Offer a direct contact through the hotel’s email or phone.
• Sign with a name and role, not just the hotel’s name.

Common mistakes

Most review problems are made worse by how the hotel responds to them. Common mistakes include:

• Treating reviews as a marketing task while the operational causes stay unfixed.
• Replying to every review with the same copied text.
• Arguing with guests in public, or revealing details of their stay.
• Offering rewards for reviews, or posting reviews from staff and friends, which can cost the hotel its listing.
• Asking only guests who seem happy, where the platform does not allow it.
• Reading single reviews in isolation instead of looking for repeated themes.
• Fixing a complaint for one guest but not changing the process, so the next guest meets the same problem.
• Leaving photos and descriptions online that promise more than the room delivers.

How to start: track themes and act on them every month

First, list the platforms where the hotel is reviewed and give one person the job of reading all of them, together with the internal feedback.

Second, sort the last few months of reviews by theme and department, and choose the one or two complaints that repeat most often.

Third, find the cause of each, agree a fix with the department head, and set an owner and a date.

Fourth, put a service recovery routine in place and train the front office and housekeeping teams on it. Training staff on written procedures is covered in our guide to hotel SOPs.

Finally, review the same themes every month: the score and number of reviews on each platform, the main positive and negative themes, the replies sent, and whether mentions of each fixed problem are falling. Scores on different platforms use different scales, so compare each platform with its own history. Reviews affect how a hotel sells online, and our guide to improving Booking.com performance covers that side.

At MMC Hotels, monitoring reviews and replying to them is part of the Grow level, Online Hotel Management. Fixing the operational causes behind complaints is part of Hotel Operations Management, and Training for Hotel Teams is offered as a separate service.