So why is it that sometimes our guests check out and we thought everything went absolutely perfect, but when the time comes to get our review, their review doesn’t reflect that? Maybe it’s even a three out of five star. Well, I’m going to tell you why this is happening and what you can do to make sure that it rarely ever, ever happens again. Stay tuned.

Welcome to short-term rental riches. We’ll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals. Quick, Actionable items to Acquire, Manage and Scale your portfolio. I’m your host Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. If you missed our last episode, by the way, definitely go back and check that out. This is the first time we actually had four guests on at one time. I know that sounds a little bit crazy, but we had an expert panel with guests like Bill Faith, Jasper Rivers, Sean Moore, and Will Slickers guys with amazing experience. It was actually an hour and a half and we cut out a couple really important questions. I just couldn’t fit them into the podcast, but you can go back and get the full version. Just go into restmethods.com forward slash panel. You can get the whole discussion. I thought it was really valuable. If you missed last week’s episode, make sure you go back and check that out.

I want to break down some recent travels for you. In fact, three different Airbnb stays and one with booking.com. Some of my recent travels over in Europe, I’ve talked a bit about that on a prior podcast episode or two, but then also a recent stay that I had in Orlando, Florida, where I went to the VRMA, one of the biggest conferences in the industry. Always a lot of good insight there. This all started from a lunch conversation that I was having with my brother, my sister-in-law, and my girlfriend in Bordeaux, France. This was about halfway through our recent Euro trip and we’d already stayed in a few accommodations. During that time, we were staying in a booking.com reservation or booking.com property. It was an amazing location. We started talking about reviews and what came out of the conversation was not what I expected. We had reviews ranging for the same properties between my family and I from three to five stars, which if we rate a property these days, a three star, that’s a D. That’s a D in, at least in our old report card ways of scoring things, right? A three is a D. That’s almost failing. And a five, well, that’s an A, right? And so, I want to break down why people rate the same properties with everything else being equal differently. So, let’s jump into this.

I have five different reasons why your Airbnb or whatever rental platform you have your short-term rental on, why those reviews might be varying greatly, even though the experience you think is pretty much the same for all of your guests. So, number one, the experience of the person leaving the review. So, when I say the experience of the person leaving the review, I’m not actually talking about their experience in the property. I’m talking about their experience or lack of experience being a host or being a property owner that’s had guests in their property before. See, this was one of the big differences between my brother and I hate to pick on him, but he gave the worst grade. He really did this property actually for all of the properties that we stayed at together and we stayed in several, break those down for you. His score pretty much across the board was lower than what mine had been. And so, if you don’t know, if you haven’t tuned into the podcast before, my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests in lots of different States now and different countries. And so, we’ve learned a lot and I also stay in a ton of short-term rentals. And so, there’s a bit of a soft spot in my heart. I guess you could say, I understand that sometimes a housekeeper forgets to take out the trash or something like that. But for someone that’s brand new to this world, they don’t really have as much of that soft spot as I do. So that’s one thing that’s really going to differ between our guest reviews is their actual experience with the property. So, there’s a couple of things we can do here.

The first is we could educate them a little bit about the review system, right? So, you’ve heard about people sending a message out that says, I’d really appreciate it if you left me a five-star review to us. A five-star review is where we got all of our communication right and the property was nice and clean and it met your expectations. I’m just throwing this out on top of my head. You might want to chat GPT this one. So, one thing that we can do to help get more consistent reviews from our new guests, those guests that have never stayed in short-term rentals before has helped to educate them a little bit about the actual review system. So, if we’re talking about booking.com, well, that’s out of 10. That’s a lot different than Airbnb, which is out of only five, right? Remember if we get a three-star, that’s a D. That is not good for our property. People are not booking three-star properties. So, one thing we can do is sort of send our guests a message. This is also something we could post directly in the apartment. Maybe you want to have it on the back of the door that says, we hope you’re enjoying your stay. If there’s anything we can do, please let us know. And when you check out, we hope that we’ve earned your five-star review. A five-star review to us is X, Y, and Z. A four-star review to us is X, Y, and Z. And you can really break it down to help them understand that if they leave you a four-star review or anything less, that they’re actually hurting you.

And so, the second reason that we’re going to get varying reviews, even though our experience might be set up exactly the same for two guests, is if they just unfortunately show up and they’re not in a good mood or maybe they miss their flight or maybe they’re going through a divorce and they’re using your short-term rental because they need some space alone. This is the reality, right? We’re in the accommodation industry. Hotels have this as well. I know I’ve talked about this before, but this is just the reality. Sometimes these things are just a little bit out of our control, but don’t get your hopes up. There is still something we can do to earn better reviews from these guests that are just in a good mood or not in a good place in their life as well. Stay tuned. There’s one thing that across the board, it always works.

Okay, so now let’s get into the third piece here, things that we can do and should definitely be doing to make sure that we’re getting more consistent reviews. And I hate to beat Dead Horse. I don’t know if that’s the best analogy anymore, actually. It sounds a little gruesome, doesn’t it? I never actually thought about when I said that before, but you know what I mean? That’s the same we’ve had for a long time. Number three is setting the right expectations. I talk about this all the time, but I want to give you just a few examples from our recent travels. This really amazing, truly amazing accommodation that we booked in Bordeaux, this property must have been three or four hundred years old. It was right in front of a historic church. It was in a historic building. It had massively tall ceilings, I don’t know, 14 feet with big arches, with big cobblestone looking things were on the interior and the exterior. The door to this thing to open to get into the courtyard was actually a door built that way because long, long time ago, people weren’t arriving at properties with cars, right? They’re arriving with horses. And so, this is one of those massive doors where a horse could come into the courtyard and wait for you while you’re in your house or whatever it happened to be. So, this was truly an amazing property in a truly amazing location right in the middle of everything. We just stepped out our door and we were next to wine bars and restaurants and all these things, but they dropped the ball in a few places. And so, one of those is in regards to expectations. They listed on their property profile that the property did indeed have air conditioning. It was a little warm there. It was kind of towards the end of the summer, so not too bad even without air conditioning. But if our air conditioning is in the living room and not in the bedroom where you’re sleeping and usually like to be a little bit cooler, that’s a good point to put in your listing, right? So, this is one place like we know we want to check all the boxes on these amenities on these listing sites.

Yes, we have a spa. Yes, we have air conditioning. Yes, we have all these different amenities, but we have to be really clear about them. And so, if we only have air conditioning in the living room, we want to put that in the listing or we want to put that in our photo captions, which is much more likely to be than actually the listing these days. So that was one of the things that happened. The other thing was in regards to a floor plan. So, you’ve all heard me talk about floor plans before. If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, they’re very important, especially for two couples staying at your property or the more couples, the more family members, the more guests staying at your property, the more important your floor plan is. So, this amazing property, as much as it was truly amazing, had a nice bedroom and then the second bedroom was accessed through the first one. So, what does that mean? That means, well, when we were sleeping at night, if someone wanted to go out late or come in late or go to the living room in the kitchen or something, they had to actually walk through the other bedroom. So really good to have a floor plan and make sure that your guests know exactly what’s going on. And that should be in your photos too, by the way. So, expectations, we’ve talked about that a whole bunch. That’s one of those things that we can do to ensure that we’re getting consistently high reviews with all of our properties.

So, number four, one other thing that we can do to consistently earn good reviews or go in the other direction, and that is cleaning. And I know I’ve talked about this one a whole bunch, but I have a couple examples from my recent travels. So that same property in Bordeaux, it had a basement bathroom, which was really cool. And I’m envisioning like a wine cellar. I think it was probably a wine cellar back in the day because it had this cool like arched ceiling, but it wasn’t, it went, you went down these winding stairs. It was really cool, but they forgot to take out the trash there. And actually, I think they left wet towels there. And so not a great first impression, right? This is one of the things, unfortunately with short term rentals, they’re just not consistent across the board. When I went to Orlando recently, I stayed in an Airbnb. Actually, I stayed in the Disney hotel during the event, during the conference, but I stuck around in Orlando a couple of days afterwards to do a little bit of property research around Florida, met up with a friend. And during that time, I booked another Airbnb downtown. Same thing. This housekeeper forgot to take out the trash. And I think they forgot to do a few other things as well. There was a saving grace here that the host was able to kind of come through. And this is something that we can do across the board. And so, I’m going to save it just for another minute or two. It’s something that can help us in all of these different situations, but cleaning is a really big one.

The next is maintenance. So, this is the fifth reason why we might be getting inconsistent reviews. Now I broke this one into two pieces. So, we have minor maintenance and we have major maintenance. Major maintenance, I would call something like the power’s out. And your guest is going to need to stay somewhere else, in which case we should have an alternative accommodation for them. We hopefully have some emergency procedures in place if something like this happens, if a storm comes in, whatever it happens to be. So that’s something I would call an emergency situation. This could also be a property in the dead of the summer and the AC goes out. I would call that emergency too. I know I don’t like to stay in a property if it’s not comfortable, right? No one does. If the temperature is not in a good place and we can’t get it fixed, then that is a major one. So, I’m going to leave those out of this conversation in regards to reviews. And I’m going to talk about just the minor instances of maintenance.

So, we stayed in an Airbnb in Paris. Again, amazing location right next to everything. You walk out on the cobblestone streets, really, really cool. It was a two bedroom. Again, a floor plan would have helped us understand a little bit more of the layout and there wouldn’t have been a slightly disappointing first impression. One of the bedrooms was tucked away, but it didn’t have like a full door, for example. So, it wasn’t fully separate. They had another bed in there. They had other windows in there, but it wasn’t like a fully complete bedroom in my opinion. So, a floor plan could have helped that. But something happened during our stay there and this happens in a lot of our properties is that the sink in the bathroom started draining slowly and it actually got to the point where it wasn’t really draining anymore. And so, this is when our one saving grace can come in to help us with any of these review situations and that I talk about all the time. Maybe you can guess it, but that is communication. So, in all of these situations, my brother’s D score very likely would have gone to a five star, you know, an A instead of a D had the communication been better in all of these properties. So, the Bordeaux example, they never even responded when we said, hey, I think the bathroom got missed downstairs. Oh, there was also no toilet paper there. So maybe a little different standard in some other places in the world. But the thing is, this property is in a really good location so they can continue to do it. But that is not an excuse, right? Had they responded, had they come back and clean the bathroom, that would have saved us from leaving a worse review. We would have left a better review for sure. The bathroom sink draining slowly in Paris, had they sent someone or had they responded and they basically were like, oh, thanks for letting us know. You know, and it literally, it stopped working, right?

So again, I have more of a soft spot for hosts. This is something obviously we would want to fix right away. But for my brother, the one who actually booked this property and he didn’t get a response, you better believe he left a worse review than I would have, but communication could have definitely helped that. Now the property I stayed in Orlando, where they also forgot to take out the trash, she had fabulous communication and she said, oh, I want you to be comfortable. When is a good time for me to send someone back over to check on it? That’s a good thing to do too. If you know that there’s something wrong, instead of asking your guests if they would like you to come by and fix something that’s blatantly wrong, it’s better just offer it up, right? So, you can say, oh, we can send someone over at this time. Does that work for you? She had really, really good communication. And ultimately, I forgot to leave a review for that property. So that brings me to one more side point here is that you want to ask for reviews, right? Especially with these guests that were very communicative, they had good experience or maybe talking a lot, you want to ask for these reviews. So sometimes we just get busy and we fail to leave one. And we know, we know that properties that have the best average score and the most review history, they always have the most visibility.

Okay. So just to recap here, there are quite a few reasons why even though your property might be perfect, and it’s set up exactly the same for two different guest reservations, you might get completely different reviews. So just to recap, the first one is how much experience does your guest have? You might want to educate them on the actual review system. Number two is, are they showing up in a bad mood? Or maybe there’s just something going on in their life. And again, this is a place where communication can help, right? Maybe someone just wants to vent. Good communication can lead to a great review in almost every situation. The third reason why you might be getting inconsistent reviews is if your expectation or your listing descriptions are not set up properly, like you list air conditioning, but it’s not actually in the bedroom. You don’t have a floor plan and someone has to enter through another bedroom. So, make sure that your listing copy and your expectations, your photos are exactly how your property is. The fourth reason is cleaning. We know this is a really, really big one. Again, having really good communication can go a long way here. Also using things like checklists with your housekeepers. And then the fifth thing is maintenance. And I just referred to minor maintenance issues in this episode and how we go about communicating with our guests when one of those things pops up. Are we there for them? Do we offer help? Do we offer assistance? Or do we just let it pass by like our experience? So, all of those things are going to change the way that our guests review our property. But with good communication and excellent hospitality, we can ensure higher reviews more consistently across the board.

So hopefully that gave you a little bit of insight to help you with your properties. We’re still quite a ways away from the hotel industry, right? And at least when it comes to all of the rentals, the millions of things are going to help us earn better reviews. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Whether you’re just getting started with short-term rentals or you’ve been in the game for a while, one thing remains the same. Your management can make or break your performance. Our team has learned a lot managing thousands of guests. And we put together a handbook just for you with our checklist to cover our exact process. There’s a lot to consider from verifying guests to managing reviews. And you don’t want to miss a step. You can get your free copy by going to restmethods.com. There’s no charge. It’s my gift to you for being one of our loyal subscribers. And I hope it helps you earn higher returns with less headache.