Guest Reviews: Getting, Answering, and Using Them

The short answer: Ask for reviews straight after check-out with no incentive attached, reply to every review including the bad ones, and never hide or cherry-pick what guests genuinely said. Since 6 April 2025, UK law bans submitting fake reviews, publishing incentivised reviews that aren’t labelled as such, and suppressing negative feedback, with the Competition and Markets Authority able to fine offenders up to 10% of global turnover. Getting reviews right is now a compliance matter, not just a marketing one.

Every serviced accommodation operator knows reviews matter. Fewer know that the rules around them changed in 2025, or that the changes carry real financial teeth.

This post covers three things: a simple system for getting more genuine reviews, how to answer the ones that go badly, and what UK law now says you can and cannot do with them. Skip the third section at your own risk. It is not guidance anyone can afford to guess at.

What changed, and why it matters to you

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025, and it gave the Competition and Markets Authority direct enforcement powers over consumer reviews for the first time. The CMA does not need to go to court. It can issue infringement notices and fines of up to 10% of a business’s global annual turnover on its own authority.

Four practices are now banned outright:

• Submitting or commissioning fake reviews - a review that “purports to be, but is not, based on a person’s genuine experience,” whether it praises or criticises the business.
• Publishing incentivised reviews without labelling them - you can still offer an incentive for a review, but the review must be “prominently and unambiguously labelled as incentivised,” and it still has to reflect a genuine stay.
• Misleading review aggregation - this covers suppressing negative reviews, cherry-picking positive ones, showing outdated reviews as current, and “review hijacking,” where reviews from a different product or listing are presented as if they belong to the one a guest is looking at.
• Facilitating fake review services - offering, buying, or recruiting for fake reviews, including through social media or generated-review software.

The CMA gave businesses a three-month grace period after the law came into force to bring their processes in line, which ended in July 2025. That period is over. If your current review process leans on any incentive that isn’t clearly disclosed, or a habit of quietly hiding the one-star reviews from your own website, it is worth fixing before, not after, someone reports you.

None of this stops you asking for reviews, following up with guests, or displaying the good ones prominently. It stops you paying for them, faking them, or curating them into a lie.

Why reviews matter more for direct bookings than OTA listings

On an OTA, reviews mostly do one job: they help or hurt your ranking and conversion inside that platform’s own search results. On your own website, they do a second job that OTAs cannot touch at all. They are the trust signal that stands in for the guarantees a big platform offers automatically.

A guest booking through Booking.com or Airbnb trusts the platform, not necessarily you. A guest looking at booking direct on your own site has none of that built-in reassurance, and has to decide, on the strength of what’s in front of them, whether to trust an operator they’ve never dealt with. Genuine, visible, well-answered reviews are one of the few things that can close that gap, alongside the trust signals covered in our guide to hospitality website UX that converts. Reviews you cannot show anywhere but the OTA that hosts them are reviews doing no work at all for your direct channel.

Which platforms to prioritise

Most operators are listed in more places than they actively manage. Trying to build momentum everywhere at once usually means nowhere gets enough attention to matter. A simple priority order:

1. Google Business Profile. It shows up directly in local search and Maps results, which is where guests searching by area or nearby landmark will find you before they find an OTA listing. It is also free to claim and maintain.
2. The OTAs you actually get bookings through. If most of your volume comes via Booking.com, that review count and score matters more to your pipeline than a platform you barely use.
3. Your own website. Not a review platform in the OTA sense, but the place every genuine review eventually gets reused, so it needs a structure ready to receive them.
4. TripAdvisor and secondary platforms. Worth claiming and keeping current, but rarely worth an active push campaign unless your guest mix specifically searches there.

Pick one platform as the priority ask for a given quarter rather than splitting attention four ways, and let the others accumulate from whichever channel each guest naturally booked through.

A review system that stays on the right side of the law

1. Ask after check-out, not during the stay

The best moment to ask is shortly after check-out, once the guest has had the whole experience and it is still fresh. Asking mid-stay catches people before they’ve formed a full opinion, and asking weeks later catches an empty inbox.

Automate the ask through whatever you already use for post-stay communication. A short, specific message beats a generic one: thank them by name, mention the property, and link straight to the platform you most want reviews on.

2. Remove every point of friction

A satisfied guest who has to search for your Google Business Profile, or create an account before they can post, will often simply not bother. Send the direct review link, not a homepage. If you want reviews split across Google, Booking.com and Airbnb, pick the priority platform for the ask and let the others happen organically from guests who book there directly.

3. Never trade an incentive for a review

You can offer a genuine incentive, a discount code, a small credit, entry into a prize draw, for guests who take the time to leave feedback. What you cannot do is present that review as unprompted and unlabelled once it’s live. If any incentive was offered, the review has to say so, clearly, where a reader will see it before reading the review itself.

The simplest way to stay compliant is to separate the two asks entirely: ask for honest feedback with no incentive attached, and run any loyalty or repeat-booking incentive as a separate programme that doesn’t require a review to unlock it. A guest portal is a natural place to run that kind of programme, and keeping it separate avoids the labelling question altogether.

4. Answer everything, especially the bad ones

Every review deserves a reply, but the negative ones are where a response actually changes a prospective guest’s mind. A defensive or generic reply confirms the complaint. A specific, calm reply that addresses what was actually raised, and says what changed as a result where something did, does more for trust than the review ever damaged.

Leave the review visible. A property with only five-star reviews and no visible negative feedback reads as curated, and increasingly, guests know to be suspicious of it. A 4.6 average with a couple of well-handled criticisms reads as real.

Before:

Thank you for your feedback. We’re sorry you had a bad experience. We take all reviews seriously and will look into this.

After:

Thank you for the honest review, and apologies the heating in the second bedroom wasn’t working properly during your stay. We’ve had it serviced this week and checked the rest of the building. If you’re ever back in the area, get in touch directly and we’ll make sure it’s right before you arrive.

The first reply says nothing specific and could sit under any complaint about anything. The second names the actual problem, states what was done about it, and gives a reason for a future guest reading the exchange to believe the issue is genuinely fixed rather than merely acknowledged.

5. Put real reviews to work

Genuine reviews are one of the only forms of content on your listings that an OTA cannot claim any credit for and cannot take with them if a guest books direct instead. Pull real quotes, attributed and lightly trimmed for length only, onto your own property pages, into post-enquiry email sequences, and into the trust-signal sections that matter most on a booking site guests are trying to decide whether to trust.

If you’re rewriting listing copy at the same time, review language is a useful source of the specific, guest-voiced detail that property listings that convert depend on. A phrase a real guest used, “the desk setup made working from here easy,” carries more weight than the same claim written by you.

What good review handling looks like day to day

• A templated but personalised post-stay request, sent automatically, with no incentive attached
• A weekly check of new reviews across every platform you’re listed on, so nothing sits unanswered for weeks
• A standing rule that negative reviews get a reply within 48 hours, before a defensive first draft, not instead of one
• A quarterly pull of the best genuine quotes into website copy, email templates and social content
• No process, anywhere, that filters, hides or deletes genuine reviews based on star rating

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still offer a discount for a review under the new UK rules?

Yes, but the resulting review must be clearly and prominently labelled as incentivised, and it still has to reflect a genuine stay. What the law bans is presenting an incentivised review as if it were unprompted, not the incentive itself.

What counts as illegally suppressing negative reviews?

Anything that removes or hides genuine negative feedback that isn’t abusive, threatening, or a platform policy violation. Filtering out anything but genuine reviews, cherry-picking only the positive ones for display, or showing outdated reviews as current all fall under the same banned practice of misleading review aggregation.

Do I need to respond to every single review, even the very old ones?

New reviews first. There’s diminishing value in replying to something from two years ago, but every new review, positive or negative, should get a reply within a few days as a standing habit, not a one-off catch-up exercise.

Does having a mix of positive and negative reviews hurt bookings?

Not in the way operators often assume. A visible run of only five-star reviews increasingly reads as curated or fake to guests who have learned to be sceptical. A realistic mix, especially with well-handled responses to the negative ones, tends to build more trust than a suspiciously perfect record.

If you want the wider picture of how reviews fit alongside the rest of your direct-booking marketing, download the cheat sheet. It covers where reviews sit in the priority order alongside the site, the listings and the follow-up sequence, so you’re not guessing what to fix next. And if you’re only getting started on reputation as a channel, the cheat sheet is the fastest way to see where it fits against everything else on your plate.