The good reviews you already have, where people decide.

The trust you have already earned, kept hidden

A property with five years of reviews holds an enormous asset that is almost always invisible outside the platforms. When somebody reaches your site directly — because they searched your name or because they were told about you — they find a page that says nothing about all that, and they hesitate right before booking.

Bringing those reviews onto the site is one of the things that most changes direct conversion, and it costs nothing: they get published exactly as their author wrote them and linked to where they live, so they can be checked.

Answer every one, the unfair one included

In accommodation, criticism is usually about expectations: the house looked bigger, the track was worse, the village was further away. A useful reply does not argue: it acknowledges whatever is true, explains what has changed and makes clear who the house suits. Whoever is reading is measuring what you are like, not how that particular stay went.

Asking at the right moment

The moment is departure, while the stay is fresh and the exchange has gone well. A short message thanking them for coming, with the link, works far better than an email two weeks later. What you can never do is give something in exchange: Google’s policies forbid incentivised reviews and platforms have similar rules.

And the Google profile, which almost nobody works on

In accommodation, platform reviews get looked after carefully while the Google profile — the one that appears when somebody searches the name of your house — gets forgotten. It is the first impression of whoever is arriving to book directly, so it deserves the same care.

The same thing, explained in general: Google profile