Negative reviews are an inevitable part of hosting. How you handle them matters more than most operators realize - both for your listing's reputation and for how potential guests evaluate you. Here's our take on what to do.
Can You Help Remove a Negative Review?
Review removal and recovery is outside our scope. We don't manage guest communications or review responses as part of our service, and we're not aware of a reliable mechanism to remove a legitimate review from any major OTA.
If you believe a review is retaliatory or violates the platform's policies, your best path is to contact the channel directly. Provide any relevant documentation - guest communications, stay records, or anything that supports your case - and let the platform's trust and safety team evaluate it. The outcome is entirely at their discretion.
How to Respond to Reviews
Responding to reviews - positive and negative - is one of the highest-leverage things a host can do for their public reputation. Most operators underinvest in it.
Positive reviews
Keep it simple and warm. Thank the guest by name, and let them know they're welcome back. It doesn't need to be long. The goal is to show future guests that you're attentive and that real people are behind the listing.
Negative reviews
This is where most hosts get it wrong - and where the biggest opportunity exists.
A negative review responded to professionally and with genuine accountability does more for your public trust than a string of five-star reviews with no response.
Future guests read your response as much as the review itself. They're evaluating how you handle problems, not just whether problems occur.
What a strong negative review response looks like:
Acknowledge the guest's experience without dismissing it
Take ownership where appropriate, even if you disagree with the specifics
Be professional and measured in tone
Avoid finger-pointing, defensiveness, or anything that reads as an argument with the guest
What you say publicly in response to a negative review is not really for the guest who left it. It's for every potential guest who reads it afterward. Treat it that way.
Automating Review Responses
If you use property management software, most platforms support automated review responses. We recommend using automation selectively.
For five-star reviews, automation works well. Build a handful of short, genuine response templates and set them to rotate randomly so responses don't feel identical. Most PMS providers have help documentation on how to configure this - check with your software provider directly for setup instructions.
For anything below five stars, respond manually. A templated response to a negative review reads as dismissive and often makes things worse. The response needs to be specific to what the guest said, and that requires a real person reading the review and writing a real reply.