Tim Hubbard (Short Term Rental Riches) explains the value of guests' private feedback (distinct from public reviews) for improving short-term rental properties. He urges hosts to read private feedback, act on recurring issues (e.g., add kitchenware, replace dryer), avoid publicly reposting private critiques, and proactively request feedback—using automation when possible—to perfect listings, boost reviews, occupancy, and revenue.
Chapters
We're really lucky to be in this short term rental world because of all of the amazing feedback that we get from our guests. It really helps us perfect our business. And so that's what I want to talk about this week, using the feedback, not just the reviews, but more specifically the private feedback. So let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches, where we'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals to help you wealth faster with as little headache as possible.
So here we are again. I want to talk briefly about private feedback. So I'm referring to. Not the review that your guest might leave you on Airbnb or VRBO or wherever it happens to be, which is public, but I'm referring to the private information that they send you a lot of times along with that public review. It's very, very important to be reading this because we're getting like a free hall pass here, right? Most of the time, the guests that are staying with us are going to leave their recommendations in this private feedback place. So they might say, hey, I loved your apartment. Everything was great. But you know what? I think your kitchen could use an additional pan or some additional utensils. A little thing, but. But a little thing that's very likely to come up again from another guest. So we want to use this private feedback as an opportunity to perfect our properties 100%. Hopefully we don't have too much of this coming up, but properties change over time too, right? Things wear out. Or maybe you have one guest that's a little more particular in the way they like a certain thing, whatever it is. But the reality is, is when the feedback is coming back, it's because there's something that could have been better for our guests. So we really, really want to make sure that we're reading all of the feedback and hopefully it gets to the point where that feedback goes to basically zero and you just have glowing reviews right now. There's a couple things that we don't want to do with the private feedback. And I have seen this before where someone will read the private feedback. Let's take an example where maybe a guest left you a great public review, but they Maybe didn't feel 100% safe in your property or they didn't like how close it was to the neighbors. Maybe something that you can't change. Now, I've seen where people will actually take this private feedback and respond publicly and say, in this example, I'm sorry, John, I'm sorry you didn't feel super safe in our property. And so when a new potential guest is coming in and potentially going to book this property, and they're reading through your reviews and they see a review from John that said, great property, five stars, and then they see a response that says, hey, I'm sorry, you didn't think it was safe. They're like, what the heck's going on here? So you don't want to basically give yourself a bad review because you're posting publicly about a private review. So it's really, really important to use this private feedback. The last bit that I'd like to leave you with today is you need to get more feedback, right? If we're not asking our guests for feedback, well, then we're not going to be getting as much of it, hands down. So you don't want to bombard someone, but it's great to send them a message. It can be automated when they're checking out and say, hey, John, you're a fantastic guest. I'll be leaving you a five star, glowing review. And we'd really appreciate if you could leave us some feedback and a review. And if John doesn't respond to it for a couple days, well, maybe we wait another day and then we send out another message asking, John, hey, we'd really appreciate it. It'll only take a quick second. You don't want to just keep sending this, right? And now Airbnb and VRBO are gonna send this on their end too. But it's definitely helpful to be sending on your own. I used to use Guesty as a management software. They actually had the ability to recognize when a guest hadn't left a review yet. So we had automation set up in there to send the guest an email when we didn't see one received. Depending on which management platform you're using, if you're using management software, some of them have this capability. So look into that. And that can save you a lot of time, right? If you're not having to write those review requests yourself, the more feedback you get, the better. Of course, we do get feedback during the stay, and we want to monitor that. We want to make sure that we're fixing anything that comes up. And I would say if you're hesitant about some of the feedback a guest gave you, maybe they said, hey, you know, I think that you should add a new dryer. Your dryer doesn't dry that well, or something like that. Maybe it's a bigger expense item and you're not quite sure if you want to do that. But then you get another message or another private feedback from another guest that says the same thing, well then it's time to change that dryer or it's time to fix whatever that issue is. So the private feedback is invaluable. We don't get this in other industries. If you go to a restaurant and you're eating and the waiter comes over and he says, how's the food? And you really do not like it, a lot of times you're not going to say, I hate this food, it's disgusting. You might say, a lot of times people don't even say anything is the reality here. In the short term rental world, it's very easy for someone to leave their response, leave their private feedback. So let's just make sure that we're asking for feedback, we're asking for our reviews and we are using it to perfect our properties. Because with a better property, we're going to have better reviews and we're going to have a higher occupancy and we're going to make more money. And that for a lot of us is one of the big reasons we're in this space. In the short term rental space instead of just doing traditional rentals, short term rentals can make much more money if we're doing it right. So take that into account, make sure you're checking your private feedback. And until next time, I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week. Take care.
