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Help your tenants to help you!

Elizabeth Weedon | 12/13/2013

Just-AskBy now most vacation rental homeowners are abundantly aware of how vitally important guest reviews have become to the success of marketing our homes. At WeNeedaVacation.com, we constantly urge our homeowners to solicit feedback from their past tenants, preferably having them submitted directly onto the listing - because vacationer entered reviews are of much greater value and credibility than homeowner entered ones.

But often vacationers will already have written a lovely note, either in a guest book at the house or in an email to the homeowner during or after their stay. Nice as this is, it makes it very difficult to then ask the vacationer to rewrite something that can be directly posted on the listing.

Here is a way to convert these valuable comments into even more valuable vacationer entered reviews. Simply copy and paste or type up the vacationers’ comments in an email to them with a nice note thanking them for the feedback – and then ask them to copy and paste their words directly into the guest review form on your listing. It will take the vacationer just a moment to do, and the resulting vacationer entered review is of much greater value to you.  Of course, using the Request Form feature from your listing makes it even easier for the vacationer as it also provides the “Write a review” link for instant access.

Do you have any other tips for soliciting guest reviews or persuading your tenants to submit their feedback directly onto your listing?

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About Elizabeth Weedon

About Elizabeth Weedon: I worked for WeNeedaVacation from 2008 until I retired in 2023. I was also one of the first vacation rental owners on the site in early 1998, when I managed my family’s Vineyard rental home. An enthusiastic member of the support staff, I provided fellow Cape and Islands vacation rental owners with advice about online marketing and rental management techniques. I created and edited much of the content on the website, as well as blogs posts and monthly newsletters. I now live on Martha’s Vineyard full time with my family.