How do you want to share guest reviews with your owners?

As a Realtor, this topic is very similar to the idea of sharing feedback with sellers after potential buyers come through for a showing. Sometimes sellers need to hear negative feedback from the buyers directly in order to really hear it. And sometimes the agent has trouble being the “bad guy,” so sharing buyer feedback with sellers helps to say, “don’t shoot the messenger.” If guests consistently complain that a bed is uncomfortable, you’ve got the ammunition and the proof that the owner needs to do something about it. 

That said, our MLS (multiple listing service) lets the agent decide whether they want feedback shared immediately and automatically with their seller clients, vs. whether the agent should get the chance to moderate / package / summarize / soften the feedback through ad-hoc reporting. 

So at a high level it seems like it would be a good thing to have at least a high-level toggle for whether reviews should even be shown on the owner portal at all. 

As for whether to filter or screen what’s shown to the owner… to me that’s straying too far away from accountability. If you ARE sharing guest reviews with your owners, I wouldn’t want it to seem like I was hand-picking only the good feedback and suppressing the bad feedback. I’d hate for an owner to get accustomed to seeing feedback on every stay, and then suddenly there’s a stay with no feedback, and to get grilled on why, and have to explain that we hid it from them because it wasn’t a perfect review. 

The private feedback is often much more valuable than the public feedback. Many guests are kind enough to leave the negative stuff in the private remarks. But again, a toggle for letting us control whether to show that detail, would let us decide on a case-by-case basis whether it’s appropriate.

I would NOT want owner statements cluttered with detailed reviews, UNLESS it’s just a column showing the number of stars that the stay received. Which like most other columns on the statements, could be turned on or off. 

Personally, I’d rather the reviews just be shown on the portal rather than having them pushed as notifications in real-time. If it was just on the portal, they can self-service at whatever frequency they care to check. This avoids having to explain to owners how to unsubscribe from all the noise. 

As for highlighting great reviews, there’s probably not enough granularity to separate the great ones from the not-great ones. We’ve never gotten anything but 5-stars, so they’re ALL great. You’d have to be analyzing the content of the review to decide whether it’s great or not, and I’m not sure how much value could be extracted from repeatedly saying “yup, another great stay”… “another great stay”… “ANOTHER great stay!” Eventually it could get tiring… “Okay, I get it, they’re all great stays :-)”

Glad this is in the pipeline. Here are my thoughts:

Ideally managers would be able to approve or reject sharing each review individually, rather than owners seeing everything automatically.

It would be great to have a separate toggle for private feedback. Sometimes it’s about the property itself, which owners should see directly from the guest. But when it’s about management, we may not want to share it.

A Reviews tab on the Dashboard makes the most sense to me. Highlighting a few of the best reviews on end-of-month statements would also be a nice touch for owners.

It’s worth pointing out that for the co-hosting model, the owner will be able to see EVERYTHING. So any attempts at filtering could potentially get noticed, and questioned.