Responding Privately to Reviews

While we advocate responding to your reviews publicly so everyone can see how seriously you take customer feedback, there may come a time when you read a review of your property and you want to respond privately. Perhaps you want to follow up to get more information about alleged bad service or an issue with a room. You put on your investigative reporter hat but you still can’t figure out who wrote the review. So what can you do?

In many cases, you can’t do anything. Orbitz, Priceline, Hotels.com, Expedia and Yahoo Travel do not let you respond privately to reviews. But, if the review is on TripAdvisor, you can send a private message to the reviewer by clicking on his/her name and then clicking the ‘send a message’ button. Remember to be polite and professional in your response. Just because your response won’t be public on the site, remember that anything you write can easily go viral. My best advice is to keep it short and sweet and request that he/she call you directly as you would really like to get more information and ensure the best possible customer service.