Tim Hubbard (Short Term Rental Riches podcast) explains how guests’ expectations—shaped by listings and prior reviews—strongly influence how they rate short-term rentals. Positive review histories create a "safety net" (guests are more lenient after isolated problems), while recent negative reviews amplify small faults. Hubbard gives numeric thresholds and examples: one 1-star review can cut bookings by ~25% or more; five reviews provide initial social proof; about 40 reviews are needed before a slightly negative review has much less impact; and it would take 34 five-star reviews to raise a damaged average back up to ~4.95. He emphasizes cleanliness, maintenance, accurate listings, and proactive communication ("Beat Expectations") and points listeners to a free ebook and striches.com.
Questions this video answers
May 6, 2025.
It can drop bookings 25% or more.
About five reviews.
About 40 reviews.
34 five-star reviews.
Chapters
A single one star review can drop your bookings 25% or more, unless you've built up a steady foundation of positive reviews already with your short term rental. If you're just getting started and you have a brand new property with zero reviews, well then most guests are actually going to be evaluating how they're going to rate your property before they actually stay there. I know that sounds really crazy, so stick with me. Let's break down this week the review expectation. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again and I hope that you've experienced staying in a lot of short term rentals in a lot of different places, especially if you are planning on having your own short term rental investments or if you already have them. Today's episode will dive into the psychology behind guest expectations, what your review history is telling future guests, and the lesser known threshold of reviews that you need before you hit your reputation's safety net. There's something really interesting about guest reviews and we can uncover these sorts of patterns when we go back and review them. The thing that's interesting is that a lot of times our guests are leaving reviews that aren't based just on the stay. No, in fact, they're based on the psychology of what they were expecting, their expectations of your property, and what those prior reviews told them. We know those expectations are anchored or based off things like your listing, your photos, your descriptions. We know those are really important. But a lot of the way that they rate your property comes down to the past reviews. There's two sides to this. So let's look at the positive side first. Let's say you have excellent reviews and a guest books your property, well, then there's automatically this sort of mistake buffer sort of built into your property. If you've set good expectations and there's proof of that that in all your prior reviews and something goes wrong, well, then your guests are probably thinking, must have been a mistake. There's no way. This is a super host. They have fabulous reviews. Of course it depends on how you handle whatever mistake comes up, but most of the time they're going to be a lot more lenient with you. Now let's flip things upside down now and let's talk about the other side of that. Someone books your property. Maybe you had a lot of great reviews, but the last couple months there's some negative ones popping up. Well, those are in their mind when they decide to book your property. And so if they check in and they find a little hair in the Bathroom. What are they going to do next? The next thing they might do is look under the bed, maybe. Then they're looking in the closet, maybe they find a hanger that's a little bit broken and they just start to look for these negative things. And maybe it's just subconscious, but we know that this happens, right? And again, if you stayed at a lot of properties before, it's impossible to not do this. If you have reviews setting the expectations, that this property's got a couple kinks, there's a couple things off and then you show up and something little happens, well, it's really just solidifying your expectation. So, yes, if your reviews have been suffering and you have one little thing go wrong, then all of the errors with your property are going to get magnified. And it's much more difficult to win that guest back to have a positive experience when they've already seen the reviews and they already confirmed them showing up to your property and they have this idea in their head that this place sucks. Your Airbnb is not cutting it. I should have known better. I should not have booked this property. So of course we can always do a good job at communication and salvage. Pretty much any situation that comes up helping our guests have a fabulous experience and leave a great review, that is the name of the game. We are in the hospitality industry, but we also know that people rate properties a little differently. Someone might have a fabulous stay, but yet they still leave you a four star review. If you've been in the industry for a while, then you know this happens from time to time. But if you've been doing a really good job, then you can build up a safety net and you can help these slightly negative reviews not hurt the overall picture. So let's talk about what that threshold is. How many reviews do you actually need before a negative one is not going to affect you that much? Well, for starters, I'd say that when someone's booking a property, if there's already five reviews there at the property, there's a bit of social proof, right? If there's five, five star reviews and someone isn't really going to think twice about booking your property so far, but as we know, you might have someone come along, that just leaves you that four star when everything seemed perfect. And so it's not until we get to about 40 reviews that having a slightly negative review has much less impact on us. Imagine having those five, five star reviews and then getting a one star review.
Crush you. And yes, most all of the time, we can avoid all These situations. But let's just say you got that one star review. Do you know how many five star reviews it would take to bring you back up? Not the five stars because that would be impossible. You can't have a perfect score after you get a negative review. But just to bring you up to a 4.95, that's 34 five star reviews. That takes a lot of time. So we got to be extra careful that we're checking all the boxes and we're not overlooking anything when it comes to our guest experience. Now when we start to get more reviews, then a negative one doesn't affect us as much. We know that your guest checking in knows this, right? They've seen that you've done a stellar job. And whatever happened last time must have just been some random mishap or you had a crazy guest, which we know that there are some crazy guests. Of course you should be leaving a fabulous review response to whatever that guest left you, helping you explain, whatever the issue, how you corrected it so that future guests aren't going to have that same issue. Okay, so quick recap here. We know that guests don't want to be that different, right? We don't want to be the crazy one out of 50 reviews that left a one star when everyone else left five stars. So those reviews really do impact how your next guest is going to review you. We know if you've been doing a really good job, then they're likely going to be more lenient with you. We know if you've been doing a crappy job, then they're going to confirm that and they're going to leave you a crappy review. We know that we need this critical mass of reviews, this threshold to really build a safety net around our property. So whenever we do get a not so great review, it has a lower overall impact. And it also doesn't discourage someone from booking because they can see all of those other fabulous reviews. So your short term rental performance really comes down to reviews. Do not drop the ball. That becomes a downward spiral. And if you get one negative review followed by another one, it's going to be easier and easier for those guests to leave not so great feedback and you're going to make less and less money. So the moral of the story here is just don't get complacent. Make sure that you have all the essentials checked right. You've got to have a clean place. We know that that causes a lot of negative reviews. Your property has to be well maintained. The expectations have to be set really well with your listing and your photos. And in my opinion, most, most importantly, you have to have amazing communication before the guest checks in, while the guest is there, and even after the guest checks out. So if I had to wrap this whole episode up in just two words, they would be this Beat Expectations. I realize that there is a lot that goes into managing a short term rental. My team and I have managed over 50,000 guests. Reviews are a huge piece of that. But we've got to have the other pieces of the puzzle in place as well. That's why we created an ebook. You can get free copy. We'll put a link down below. It's got checklists, it has lessons learned for managing lots and lots of guests and I'm sure that it will help you earn some better reviews. Get your free copy. You can also find on our website@striches.com we know your next five star review starts before your guest even arrives. So keep expectations clear, deliver consistency, and remember, once you hit critical mass of reviews, you you've got a safety net. But don't get complacent. Stay sharp, stay humble and your reviews will continue to do the marketing for you. See you in the next episode.
