How to take back control of your online reviews

Booking platforms send review requests on the date of the booking, whether or not anyone turned up. There is a better trigger.

Review requests fired by a booking date do not know whether the guest turned up. That one fact is behind a lot of unfair scores.

A guest books a table through a platform, never arrives, and the platform still sends its automated review request on the day the booking was for. Some people ignore it. Plenty do not, and they rate an experience they never had, or they rate the deposit they could not get back.

Either way the score moves, and the score is what the next guest reads.

Why platform triggers get it wrong

Booking and review platforms fire the request from the booking record. Nothing in that record says whether a person walked through the door. The trigger is a date, not a visit.

You can dispute individual reviews and sometimes you win, but you are arguing after the score has already moved, and the process is slow enough that most operators stop bothering.

Trigger the request from the visit instead

Guest Wi-Fi gives you a signal the booking date never can.

1. A device connects to your network, which puts a guest in the building.

2. The device disconnects and stays off the network, which is a fair read that they have left.

3. The request goes out after that, to the person who signed in, with the visit attached to their profile.

Stampede runs this as an automation: the Wi-Fi session is the trigger and the review request is the action, handled by workflows, so nobody has to remember to send anything and no request goes to a guest who never arrived.

The honest limit is coverage. A guest on mobile data, or one who declines the sign-in, triggers nothing. Those guests still get asked, by email or at the table, just not automatically off the back of a visit.

Get the timing right

A request that lands just after the visit catches the evening while the guest still remembers it: who served them, what they ate, how long the wait was. Three days later you get a vaguer answer, and vague answers drift towards whatever happened last.

Timing also lifts the response rate, because the guest is still thinking about you.

Ask by text as well

Email alone loses everyone who never opens it. SMS lands on the phone they are already holding on the walk to the car, and a link in a text takes one tap.

Send both, or send SMS to the guests who left a mobile number and email to the rest.

Check what you are actually being rated on

Pull your last ten reviews and ask whether each one describes a visit. Any that are about a booking that never happened, a platform you do not control, or a policy the guest had not read are the leak.

Guest Wi-Fi gives you the visit signal and reviews sends the request off the back of it. Email contact@stampede.ai or book a demo and we will set the trigger up for your venue.