Positive reviews of an apartment for lease on the Web are a boon for holiday rental management. The trust instilled in potential renters increases demand, adds value to your business, and favors your search engine optimization. But there’s an enemy that’s come to lurk in the woods: fake reviews. Ghost-written and paid reviews are doing tremendous damage to the online commerce and sales sector; on some large portals for the purchase and sale of goods and services, the OCU reports almost 10% of reviews are fake or paid. Giants like Amazon are taking measures to end these harmful practices. They have already expelled several brands from the platform and put machine-learning tools and researchers in place to analyze reviews. With the hope that this cleanup continues, today we want to discuss the benefits of good, real online reviews for holiday rental management and how employing good practices to obtain them has positively affected Lodging.
Positive online reviews: the challenge for every SME
Why would companies invest part of their revenue in paying for fake reviews? Because the importance of good reviews on the Web is well documented and of vital importance where tourism apartments in Barcelona are concerned. Good reviews are added value for your holiday rental management project and increase user trust. In the world of cold online purchases, they provide the push users need to make a decision because our brains are wired to follow the crowd and believe if others liked something, we will too. They also improve positioning in search results on the Internet, giving your apartment greater and more reliable visibility.
Reviews and Lodging Management
Our company has more than 105 listings on Airbnb and a total of 1,647 reviews. 83% of these reviews have given us 5 stars, meaning we’ve had the fortune to make a lot of our customers happy and create opportunities for further growth and investment!
But the road hasn’t always been easy. There were some particularly difficult moments in 2016 and 2017, when, after sustained growth, we had to adapt to changes in regulations and licensing at the city level, including a total ban on new tourism licenses. And after a lot of adaptation and strategy changes resulted in getting us back on the right track, we faced the pandemic.
Fortunately, it turned out that our lessons in adaptation were exactly what we needed to weather the next storm. Because our objectives as a company were clear and we were scaling organically, we were able to use our time productively, even when the borders were closed. In addition, we established synergies with professionals who made great contributions to our business and we diversified our portfolio of holiday rental apartments.
We also grew even closer to our community because we put our focus on the welfare of our clients and guests, addressing their suggestions, issues and comments on various platforms. The entire team, including our administration, finance, logistics and marketing departments, worked together with our owners to improve the quality of every aspect our apartments. And the result? A hard-won and very gratifying upsurge in positive reviews that we know are real because they were written by the same guests that stayed in our apartments in Barcelona.
Thanks to our years of experience in holiday rental management, we know working as a team with a well-defined strategy is the best way to get positive feedback from our customers. For us, easily identifiable fake reviews, which in any case are bound to have a short lifespan, have no value whatsoever. At Lodging Management, we’re committed to continuing to earn the real loyalty of our customers one experience at a time.
