The importance of guest reviews

Protecting your guests’ email addresses

The importance of guest reviews

1. Improve Your Property Listing Content. Guest reviews are an integral part of your property's advertisement on both FlipKey and TripAdvisor. Even in the most competitive areas, adding a few guest reviews significantly improves your listing quality - boosting inquiries and bookings. We encourage you to invite all your past guests to leave a review – even if they booked through other listing sites or through your personal website.  A recent FlipKey study determined that properties with 3+ guest reviews significantly outperformed other properties.

2. Boost Inquiry and Booking Volume. Elevated placement in property search results means more visibility, and consequently more inquiries and bookings. You will certainly see a much higher success rate by taking advantage of every opportunity to collect a review.

3. Improve Your Own Personal Website and Your FlipKey Property Listing. FlipKey provides users with a widget that allows you to display your guest reviews on your personal website.  We also have a fantastic feature that allows guests to submit photos of your property with their review, giving your listing a competitive edge. 

4. Instill Trust in your Property Listing.  Nearly 80% of travelers say they are significantly more likely to book a property if they can read reviews from past guests (1).  Guest reviews improve consumer confidence and trust in your property listing, which will attract more prospective guests to your listing and can typically yield higher booking rates.  Most travelers have great experiences staying in a vacation rental so why not encourage them to share their experience with others. According to a recent PhoCusWright study, nearly 90% of vacation rental guests would recommend renting a vacation home following their stay. Our own research confirms this, as the vast majority of guest reviews on FlipKey are very positive.

(1)   Compete.com

Quick Tip! Inviting a loyal repeat guest to leave a review is a great way to start collecting positive feedback!

Protecting your guests’ email addresses

FlipKey only uses your guests’ email address to collect reviews for your property. We do not sell your guests’ email addresses to third parties and we do not contact your guest for any reason other than to collect reviews on your behalf. Your guests’ email addresses are completely safe.  In our Terms & Conditions, we specifically address this issue:

 "You hereby agree to allow FlipKey to send review requests on your behalf based on the contact information (email address) of past guests' that you provide …FlipKey respects the privacy of your customers and our users and hereby agrees not to reuse this information for remarketing purposes.”

We encourage you to send this section of our Terms & Conditions to your guests so that they can be confident that none of their contact information will be used for additional solicitation or marketing purposes.