All property managers know that vacation rental reviews and ratings are absolutely crucial. A good review is very often the difference between a guest deciding to book a rental listing, or moving on to look at the next option.
Reviews are a major ranking factor for OTAs like Airbnb and Booking.com, which means that they play a significant part in determining whether a guest comes across your listing in the first place.
And yet, for some reason, reviews often get left out of the conversation when talking about distribution and revenue management. Property managers tend to focus on other optimization techniques, like setting up discounts and adjusting prices. While these may be of high importance, they’re not the only ways to increase bookings, occupancy and revenue.
At Rentals United, we want to help property managers get the most out of their listings. And we believe that ignoring reviews and failing to do basic review management is a mistake. That’s why we’ve created a tool that will help you stay on top of your Airbnb and Booking.com reviews and manage them in a quick and efficient way, without having to log in to the channels’ extranet.
In this article, we’ll tell you all about it – but first, we’ll talk about why you should care about reviews in the first place.
Why vacation rental reviews are more important than you think
- Reviews help you build trust. Since reviews act as social proof, they’re the most powerful tool you have to build trust with potential guests. When a guest has had no prior experience with your company, there’s nothing like an authentic review written by another guest to reassure them and help validate their choices. Simply put, reviews turn browsers into bookers.
- Reviews give you more visibility. OTAs prioritize listings with lots of good reviews because they’re more likely to be booked by new guests. As a result, 5-star reviews help you rank higher on Vrbo and are crucial for Airbnb SEO. The more good reviews you have, the more likely that guests will see your listings on OTAs and the more conversions you’ll get.
- Responding to reviews allows you to show off your customer service skills. By responding to a negative review in an attentive, cordial way, you can show potential guests that you provide impeccable customer service. If there is a problem, you come up with a solution instead of trying to hide or ignore it.
In summary, reviews make your listings more easily discoverable, and once discovered, more appealing to guests. This has tangible results, for example, an increase in occupancy.
According to vacation rental data provider Lighthouse, there is a correlation between higher review count and occupancy, as well as higher rating and occupancy.
Think about the last time you bought a product online, or used a booking service. Did you check previous customer reviews? Did the reviews give you confidence to book, or perhaps enough doubt to keep searching for other options?
Reviews are an important decision-making factor for guests, and are therefore an important aspect of your rental strategy that is worth investing time to optimize.
How to use vacation rental reviews to your advantage
If you’re a property manager who likes to stay on top of their guest communication, you’re probably already sending guests automated review requests on the day they check out. Maybe you even send a follow-up email a few days later if the first one didn’t achieve the intended result.
In addition, you also periodically log into all your channel extranets to see if there are any new reviews that require a response. But, if you’re like most property managers we talk to, your review management efforts end there.
As we teased at the beginning of the article, we think that this approach to vacation rental reviews leaves a lot of revenue opportunities on the table.
You could be missing out on huge possibilities to boost your bookings, occupancy and revenue.
For example, are you checking if all your listings have recent reviews?
There’s a good chance that if your properties haven’t been reviewed in months, new prospects are going to notice that – and may decide not to book.
Think about it this way: You are a potential guest, and are looking at two very similar properties. The first one has several positive reviews from the past month, and although the second listing also has glowing feedback, it hasn’t been reviewed for half a year. Which do you feel more confident about booking?
Your listings need recent reviews at the time when guests want to book – not when they want to stay. So, have a look at your booking windows from the previous year and make sure that by the time your heavy booking season starts, all your properties are equipped with fresh reviews.
This is just one example of a review management strategy you can use to optimize your booking potential and occupancy rates, which can help maximize revenue during peak season, and can be a lifesaver during the slower off-season months.
Smart tools like Rental United’s Analytics platform give you powerful data and performance metrics to support your strategies, and seamless integration with our channel manager and unified inbox makes implementing these strategies far smoother than updating everything manually.
Let’s see how it works.
How to get the most out of your Airbnb and Booking.com reviews
Rentals United is a Preferred Software/Connectivity Partner of both Airbnb and Booking.com, which means that your ratings and reviews can be integrated directly into the RU Analytics platform.
This means that you can examine all your Airbnb and Booking.com review activity directly in the RU Analytics platform without having to log into the Airbnb or Booking.com extranet.
Not only can you view all your reviews and ratings in one place, you can also use the Analytics tools to identify patterns, make predications, and take actionable steps to improve your listings’ reviews, based on historic data and ongoing trends.
Here are a few things you can do:
- See an overview of all your Airbnb and Booking.com listings’ reviews and ratings for a specific date range. You can even see the rating per reservation (which is not available in the Airbnb extranet – you can only see the average rating there).
- Export the data so you can create a workflow and delegate review responses to anyone in your team.
- With the Airbnb Quality Dashboard, you can see detailed breakdowns of review scores by key categories like Communication, Cleanliness, Check-in, Accuracy, Location, Value in colour-coded form. This helps you spot weak points at a glance, and make adjustments.
- See your top 10 reviewed properties and bottom 10 reviewed properties at a glance. This allows you to quickly identify which listings need immediate attention.
- The Main Complaints Summary is a feature that pulls together frequently reported issues from your guest reviews and shows you how many reservations flagged those issues. For example, how many guests complained about late check-in in their reviews, helping you prioritize operational improvements.
- Automated Airbnb Reviews is a feature that allows you to use template responses, and set them to send after guest checkout, but still retain the ability to edit or skip. This makes sure every stay gets targeted feedback, increasing review volume and quality.
- The Reviews Report in the Analytics platform aggregates guest feedback from multiple OTAs like Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and Vrbo into one place. This lets you compare which channels are giving you what kind of feedback, spot trends across channels, and fix issues that might be channel-specific.
- See how many reviews you received on each day of the week. This helps you figure out what the best day is for sending review requests or reminders to your guests via email.
The bottom line: Optimize your vacation rental reviews to boost your occupancy
Finding a way to efficiently manage your vacation rental reviews is key to increasing your occupancy in 2025.
If you’re already sending your guest’s emails asking them to leave a review, great. If, on top of that, you also regularly log into your channel accounts to check on your reviews, even better.
But this year, if you really want to get the most out of your listings, you’re going to have to take things a step further.
Maintaining a steady stream of positive, recent reviews is absolutely critical to maximizing your occupancy, and automation gives you a significant advantage while saving you time and energy that you could instead spend streamlining operations, or growing your business.
Making use of a dedicated channel manager is a game-changer in staying on top of the game, and tools like RU Analytics help you improve your workflow and make the process of review management so much more efficient.
May 2022 bring you hundreds of stellar reviews and increased occupancy rates!
The winter season brings many high-value vacation rental opportunities, so finish 2025 strong, with a calendar full of bookings and positive guest reviews.
Keep a steady stream of positive reviews with RU Analytics. Start today.