I have owned a small hotel for 7 years and currently around 70% of our business is generated through on-line booking agents with whom guests are invited by email to write a review. I don’t know the industry average response but our own analysis show that less than 2% (yes you did read that right 2%) write a review. Despite that low figure we currently have over 100 reviews across 3 major websites.

Allowing for each agents’ slightly different scoring mechanisms you may also be surprised that our average score on each is between 8/10 and 9/10 and has been for years. Within that individual scores range from 10/10 to 2/10 and comments range from the good, to the bad, to the downright ugly

The purpose of me boring you with these statistics (be grateful I could give you a lot more) is to make the point that if someone wanted to harm me that they would have to post an awful lot of bad reviews to impact the overall score. This is because all the time they are posting low scores genuine guests would be posting ‘normal’ scores. And it works the other way around too if you were to post your own high scores. As for comments, those that appear outside the norm stick out like a sore thumb and guests will dismiss them as either the ranting of an idiot or fakes.

Last point –honestly! You don’t have to be a marketing expert to know that first impressions count. Before a potential guest reads your reviews they have pretty much made up their mind from the main pictures. It is then reinforced by the first few sentences of your description. By the time they get to the reviews they should be on your side. So the point I make here is forget wasting time on reviews (unless, of course, you’ve got loads of spare time!) and spend more time making sure your website is crisp and up to date, the pictures look fantastic, and the text is punchy enough to sell in a couple of sentences.