As a smart vacation rental PM or homeowner, you probably already know that most guests who would leave a great 5-star review also tend to be the ones who forget the most. If the stay was bad, they are more likely to leave a review because the sting of it stays with them or they want to get even by hurting your business. But many would-be 5-star reviews get completely dropped after the guest has gone. Out of sight, out of mind!
Both Airbnb and Vrbo proactively nudge the host and guest to leave a review, but many guests still don't write one. As you may have noticed, the biggest thing that pushes the guest to leave a review is when you, yourself, write a review first. When that happens, Airbnb and Vrbo send the guest a message saying "Read what the host said about you" or "See your rating," but first makes the guest write their own review. This is extremely useful because it pushes most guests to write a review who would otherwise not have.
Over time, many hosts that have discovered this trick will quickly run through their Airbnb or Vrbo bookings, every few days, and write a few quick sentences like "Thanks for coming out, great guest, would host again!" in different variations or select a 5-star review. If you're a PM managing dozens of properties, you probably don't have detailed information to leave on each guest, but if nothing negative happened, you want to prompt all of them to write a review. So you run through them and leave some generic happy words.
Learn more by reading Reviews on Airbnb and Vrbo's About the Reviews page.
As long as your bookings don't trigger certain negative indicators, OwnerRez will do that for you! You can use OwnerRez to automatically write 5-star reviews for your Airbnb or Vrbo bookings.
At present, this system works only for Airbnb or Vrbo bookings.
- Turn On Automatic 5-Star Reviews
- Configure Settings
- When to Skip
- Manage Review Templates
- Cancel an Automatic Review
- Delete an Automatic Review
- Notes
- FAQs
Turn On Automatic 5-Star Reviews
To see it in action, go to the CRM menu > Reviews and click on Host Reviews. The Host Reviews tab will only be available and displayed if you have either an Airbnb or Vrbo channel integration in place. On the top right, from the Automatic 5-Star Reviews dropdown list, select Turn On for either Airbnb or Vrbo.
On the "Are you sure you want to turn on automatic 5-star reviews?" window, select "Yes, turn on now," and your automatic 5-star reviews will be turned on.
You can select the "Configure Settings" from the same Automatic 5-Star Reviews dropdown list for either Airbnb or Vrbo.
Configure Settings
The Automatic 5-Star Review Configure Settings is slightly different between Airbnb and Vrbo.
Airbnb
The Airbnb configuration page asks you how long you want to wait after the booking to write the review (we recommend just a couple of days - no more than 2 or 3), what review template you'd like to use, and the negative indicators, including booking or guest tags, that you want to flag so that the system doesn't accidentally write good reviews for bad people.
Vrbo
The Vrbo configuration page asks you how long you want to wait after the booking to write the review (we recommend just a couple of days - no more than 2 or 3), and which bookings to skip so that the system doesn't accidentally write good reviews for bad people. Review templates are not supported by Vrbo, but you can still submit a host text review manually on the Vrbo platform.
When to Skip
That last "Bookings to Skip" part is especially important to understand. You don't want OwnerRez accidentally writing good reviews for bad guests - this could push an irritable guest to leave you a bad review if they anticipated that you did that to them first. So, make sure to read through the "Bookings to Skip" section and select the negative indicators. Each of the options is an indicator that the booking may have been a bad or negative experience. For instance, if money was collected from the security deposit, you may not want to write a 5-star review because (a) the guest might have caused damage or (b) the guest might be upset about the extra charge, and you don't want to encourage them to write a review.
For instance, you might have a "bad guest" tag that you proactively add to the booking in the middle of a stay. If so, simply use the "is tagged" criteria to select those tags.
Manage Review Templates
If you'd like OwnerRez to rotate between different types of responses, you can do that for Airbnb bookings. Simply go back out to the Host Reviews area, click on the top right Manage Templates button, and write as many templates as you want.
Vrbo does not support review templates, but you can still submit a host review manually on the Vrbo platform.
These are the same review templates that you use as "drafts" when writing reviews on the booking.
By their nature, review templates should be short - no more than a couple of sentences. The point of automatic reviews is that they aren't detailed and don't talk specifically about the guest's stay.
If you want to write detailed reviews, then you shouldn't use automatic reviews. You should continue writing reviews manually one by one as the opportunity arises.
After saving your review templates, the Airbnb Automatic 5-Star Review settings page will show the list of templates and let you select the ones you want to send as automatic if you don't want to use the entire list.
This will allow you to separate the generic "good guest" Airbnb reviews from the others you might use for more detailed responses or bad/negative responses.
Cancel an Automatic Review
Sometimes, a guest isn't a great fit for our property, and there may be times when you want to cancel the automatic 5-star review altogether and write a manual review. You can cancel the automatic review by clicking on the Cancel Automatic Review button on the specific Booking > Reviews tab.
Delete an Automatic Review
Airbnb and Vrbo create review objects for every booking, and automatic reviews can't be fully deleted. Even if users choose not to write a review body or stars, there is still an empty review object to track the timeline and deadlines.
OwnerRez recommends that users who wish to choose not to leave a review should hide it instead by editing the individual review and using the "Save Draft" button to clear off the scheduled flag and put the automatic review into draft mode.
Hiding an automatic review in draft mode does not hide it from your dashboard, but it appears that no review will be sent to Airbnb or Vrbo.
Notes:
- Automatic reviews are not applied to canceled bookings.
- Automatic reviews are always 5 stars, nothing less. If you want to write a 3 or 4-star review, that's something you need to do manually. By their nature, automatic reviews are always 5 stars because you don't care about the detail and are just trying to push guests to write you a review in return.
- Automatic reviews are only attempted one time. Once the review day has arrived, if the booking has criteria that make the booking get skipped, then the system will not try again if the criteria changes. For example, if the booking has a "bad guest" tag on it that causes the automatic review not to go out, then a week later, the "bad guest" tag is removed, the review still won't be written. You'll have to manually write the review yourself. This is a safety precaution so that bookings aren't accidentally reviewed automatically after the usual time.
- Automatic reviews are the same as manual ones. They are just like the manual reviews you write yourself on the booking and are subject to all the same rules. For instance, an automatic review cannot be changed after the fact once it is submitted.
- Automatic reviews only work within the 14 day review time period. As mentioned previously, automatic reviews work the same as manual ones. Once it has been more than 14 days, an automatic review is no longer possible, just as a manual review isn't.
FAQs
How do I handle the "A scheduled or automatic review for Guest Name was not submitted. You will need to submit this review manually on Vrbo" error?
There may be occasions where you receive an OwnerRez email notification stating, "A scheduled or automatic review for Guest Name was not submitted. You will need to submit this review manually on Vrbo."
There could be a couple of reasons why you received this notification.
- The guest has already reviewed the reservation publicly before the host has reviewed the guest. This basically happens when the guest reviews through the OwnerRez Guest Review form, and it becomes an imported review from Vrbo's perspective, so Vrbo assumes it's already public.
- Vrbo's intent behind this is to prevent retaliatory reviews. Vrbo ensures that neither party can see the other's reviews before accepting them.
- The guest reviewed the stay more than 14 days ago.
- The checkout date is more than 180 days ago.