Lu_Madrid

Hi!

It is not mandatory! However, in order to have your response published publicly, Booking.com will only allow responses in the same language as the original review from the guest or in English.

Hi everyone! I haven't been posting for a very long time, but I find this topic very interesting! I completely agree with @Bandara Hotels. This new method is not perfect and it could definitely be improved.

We should give Booking.com our feedback. Without any feedback, one never knows how it could go well or wrong.

So far, the new system seems to be worse than better, at least in my case. I completely understand that people's opinions are always subjective and, for one person a 7 might be quite OK, but for others, that is a bad rate. 

One of the things I miss in this new rating system is that guests tend to subject 1 point per section they see they didn't give a full 10/10 rate. It happened to us in several occasions. I'll give you an example: A guest rates 4 categories 10/10 and then two 7,5/10. Since they didn't rate 10/10 in two of them, the "obvious" thing to do for them is rating a total score of 8/10, given the fact that there're no decimals now.

I've also faced situations when the total score, according to the old system would be, let's say, 8,3, but then the total given score was 5. Shouldn't there any way to control this kind of disparities?

Other platforms, such as Airbnb, re-checks with the guest with a popping message when they give a lower overall rate, and I think that would be extremely helpful.  

What do you think? Have you had issues like that as well?

Very interesting points of view! :)

M Adamopoulou yes, some guests are very unreasonable and definitely should treat them kindly.That returns to you, for sure! Specially in those cases.

You're completely right, pibomarco when it comes to accidents we try to be as nice as possible and those damages will be covered by us, but when there's an abusive behavior, we do try to reach them first and explain the situation nicely. We don't have a 24h front desk reception, so some guests leave before 6am in the morning and leave the property without being checked, meaning that we have to contact them by phone or e-mail.

I think defending yourself on a comment from things such as coffee, decoration, staff, cleaning matters is useless and it may not look good. However, I'd like to have the choice to reply those guests such as the ones in my previous comment in this thread.

Fortunately, we haven't had many problems (touch wood), but when it happens, it is usually not a small accident.

Hi fluff , sure! We do as well, but as pibomarco says, there are some guests who are not very eager to tell you in person.

pibomarco, as a person who usually travels, I tend to book lodgings with ratings over 8/10. If I see different options, I try to read the reviews as to make the decision of choosing which property to book easier. There are hundreds, or even thousands, of accommodation options in the center of Madrid, so you have to differentiate yourself from other properties somehow. We try to show our potential guests that we care about trying to improve. Other people may not use this as a tool, but everybody has a different opinion and a way of doing things.

Replying the review of a guest may not be taken the same way to different people. In addition to that, there are plenty of ways to write down a response. It does not need to be a message "over-defending" oneself. What we usually do is thank the guest for the honest review and tell them that we will take that into account, but we don't believe in "the guest is always right", sorry. We are all people and we should all know our rights, responsibilities and as both a guest and a host, I try to be as respectful as possible.

M Adamopoulou All our anonymous reviews have also been good so far! Over 9/10, so we cannot complain. However, I do believe BDC should allow us, hosts, to reply to those bad reviews left by unpleasant guests, who usually want to take "revenge".
We have an average of over 9/10 on Booking.com and over 150 reviews, which are not too many for some of the hosts here, but since we only have 6 rooms and opened for less than a year, we are pretty happy about it. Since that's not a big amount of reviews, having a bad review also affects more than having a 5/10 among 1000 reviews.

We do take all reviews and ratings very seriously and we think that low rates should come along with a comment specifying what they were not happy about. The bigger issue for us is not knowing the person who wrote it but what they were not happy about. As a small property, we want to take advantage of having few guests as to take every single feedback into account to offer a better service.

pibomarco I know what you mean. A 10/10 is pretty obvious and it means that the guests were happy about everything and they had nothing bad to write. But, for example, going back to the case that some people want to take "revenge", we had a couple of very disrespectful guests once who broke the shower hose, ruined the towels, left the room all messy and dirty, smoke in the room (it is completely prohibited to smoke in our property), left all smoked cigarettes on the floor and left a burnt stain on our furniture and, on top of that, made a lot of noise, disturbing other guests during their sleep. It was long time ago when we just opened and we did not have as many reminders of the house rules in the property. Since it was part our fault for not placing those reminders in bigger signs, we thought they should at least pay for the broken shower hose, so we charged them the cost of the shower hose - not any extra, just the hose -. That was 20€. They called us complaining about it for like an hour.
Now, we have a fine of at least 100€ for smoking and we add an extra for the labor fee, transport to get the broken article and what the article itself costs. The amount that they might have had to pay would be up to 200-300€. They only paid 20€. Their rate was 3,8/10, which made our rating immediately drop down. The guest did not leave any comment but the rating only.
I am talking about that type of ratings. We don't mean to write any angry message or comment about that rating but we do want to, at least, explain to our future guests why those guests left that review.

What I think that BDC should do is either letting us reply even when there are no comments from the guests, not letting guests who have been reported by the property to leave a comment or, at least, let us review all our guests as Airbnb does. People would be more conscious about their behavior. At least, that's my opinion from my experience.

Hi M Adamopoulou ,

Yeah, I was aware of that. I didn't know that BDC gave the guests 3 months to write the review though!

Luckily, since our property is very small, we do know who left the review, specially when they write down comments too since we may identify it by any issue they may have mentioned during their stay.

However, in some cases, especially when the guest leaves a bad rating without a review, I believe that BDC should, at least, allow the property to reply. Have you had that problem?

Thanks, Leandri Klopper !

Looking forward to hearing from you if you have any feedback! :)