As a vacation rental PM or homeowner, you know that guests leaving 5-star reviews often forget details. If a stay was bad, they might leave a review to vent or hurt your business. Many potential 5-star reviews are dropped after the guest leaves—out of sight, out of mind!
Both Airbnb and Vrbo encourage hosts and guests to leave reviews, but many guests don't. The biggest motivator is when you, the host, write a review first. Then, Airbnb or Vrbo sends a message like "Read what the host said about you" or "See your rating,' prompting guests to review. This method effectively increases review likelihood.
Many hosts discover this trick and quickly review their Airbnb or Vrbo bookings, often leaving simple comments like "Thanks for coming out, great guest!" or selecting a 5-star review. Managers with dozens of properties may not have detailed info on each guest but still aim to prompt reviews if nothing negative occurred, leaving generic happy comments. As long as your bookings don't trigger certain negative indicators, OwnerRez will do that for you! You can use OwnerRez to write 5-star reviews for your Airbnb or Vrbo bookings automatically.
Learn more by reading Reviews on Airbnb and Vrbo's About the Reviews page.
- Turn On Automatic 5-Star Host Reviews
- Configure Settings
- When to Skip
- Manage Review Templates
- Cancel an Automatic Review
- Caveats
- FAQs
Turn On Automatic 5-Star Host 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. From the Automatic 5-Star Reviews dropdown list, select Turn On for either Airbnb or Vrbo. You can select "Configure Settings" from the same Automatic 5-Star Reviews dropdown list 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.
Configure Settings
Once turned on, automatic 5-Star host review Configure Settings are 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.
When configuring which bookings to skip, you have the option to select the following.
- The booking is canceled.
- If the booking is canceled and the guest didn't stay, there is no need to leave a host review.
- The "Guest Has Problem" flag was turned on
- If you have Problem Guests, you will probably want to skip sending a 5-star host review because it would be untrue.
- There was an amount kept from the security deposit
- If you need to charge a Security Deposit Hold or Refundable Security Deposit, you may want to skip sending a host review, as this typically indicates that something negative (e.g., damage) occurred during a guest's stay.
- The security deposit is still pending release
- This option enables hosts to thoroughly inspect their property before manually responding to a guest review.
- Any refunds were sent
- If refunds were sent to the guest, this may indicate that something negative (e.g., guests arrived at an unclean property) occurred during their stay.
- Any notes were written
- If you, as the host, generally reserve guest notes for negative information, this may indicate that something negative (e.g., bad behavior, damage) occurred during their stay.
- The booking or guest is tagged
- For instance, you might have a "bad guest" tag that you proactively add to the booking during 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 may not be a great fit for our property, and there may be times when you want to cancel the automatic 5-star review and write a manual review instead. You can cancel the automatic review by clicking on the Cancel Automatic Review button on the specific Booking > Reviews tab.
Caveats:
- Automatic reviews are always 5 stars, with no exceptions. If you want to write a 3 or 4-star review, that's something you need to do manually.
- Automatic reviews are only attempted once. If a booking has criteria that cause it to be skipped, the system won't attempt the review again, even if those criteria change. For example, if a "bad guest" tag prevents an automatic review and is later removed, the review won't be generated automatically. You'll need to write it manually. This is a precaution to prevent late automatic reviews.
- Automatic reviews are identical to 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 it is submitted.
- Automatic reviews only work within the 14-day review time period. As mentioned previously, automatic reviews function in the same manner 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.