Reputation recovery in 90 days

Half-a-star moves are not earned by replying faster. They are earned by routing the right review to the right operator inside the same week the guest leaves. This playbook is the sequence Autumn customers run when peak season is six weeks away and the score is sitting at 4.1.

0.4★median score lift across 90 days, top quartile

 

14dwindow between review and response that drives the most lift

Triage and the first 14 days

Start with a 14-day audit. Pull every review from the last 90 days and tag each by category — service, F&B, room product, location, comp set noise. The largest category is your starting workflow.

The category split is rarely what the GM team expects. Most properties assume "service" is the dominant complaint and discover that "room product" — usually a cluster of HVAC, soft-goods, or noise issues in a specific room block — is what's driving the score down. A category audit done in week one tells you which operating workflow to prioritize for the rest of the 90 days.

The deliverable at day 14 is a single one-pager: the dominant category, the rooms or shifts implicated, the named operator who owns the fix, and the SLA on the first ticket.

Response cadence and team RACI

The window between review post and response is the strongest lift on score, and not because of the response itself — because the operator who replies also reads. The act of replying forces the GM into the review queue, which surfaces the cluster, which routes the cluster to the workflow owner.

A workable RACI for a 50–200 room property:

• Responsible: GM replies to every review under 4 stars within 48 hours.
• Accountable: Regional manager owns the score trend across the cluster; reviews per quarter at the regional level.
• Consulted: Workflow owner (Housekeeping, F&B, FOH) reads every review tagged in their category and responds to the linked ticket within 72 hours.
• Informed: Marketing and revenue see the trend in the weekly report; no individual response duty.

48hGM response SLA on negative reviews (recommended default)

The cadence is not about the response itself. It's about putting the GM in the review queue every week so the cluster gets named.

Closing the loop with operations

Reputation is a downstream signal. Every review that ladders to a fixable workflow becomes a ticket; every ticket closes with a verification reservation flagged on next stay.

The verification reservation is the part most reputation tools miss. A guest complains about a noisy room. The maintenance team fixes the seal on the door. The next reservation in that room is flagged "post-fix verification" — the guest service team checks in proactively, the score on that stay is logged against the fix, the cluster is closed when three verification reservations show no recurrence.

The deliverable at day 90 is a closed-loop report: the dominant category at week 1, the workflow owner who took the ticket, the verification reservations that confirmed the fix, the score lift recorded against the cluster. If three categories close their loops in 90 days, half a star is realistic. If two close, expect a third of a star.