Reviews
Reviews in ReservationBay are attached to the booking they are about. That is what makes them worth something: only someone who actually rented from you is asked, and one rental can produce at most one review.
Reviews are an optional feature, switch them on under Settings → Features.
Switching the requests on
Review requests are off until you switch them on. Enabling the feature does not start mailing your customers.
Turn them on under Settings → Email & SMS, where you also choose how many days after the rental ends the request goes out. The default is 2. Setting it to 0 sends it on the day the rental ends.
The request goes out once a day to the renters whose rental ended exactly that many days ago, in their own language.
What the customer does
They follow a link and write their review on a public page, no account, no password. A rating out of five is required; a title, the text and the display name are optional.
If they do not give a display name, their first name is used. A published review never carries a full name that nobody agreed to publish.
The link works once. Submitting spends it.
The reviews screen
At the top: your average rating and how many published reviews it is based on.
Below, your reviews with their booking, split into what needs you and what does not:
- Awaiting your decision: written, not yet published.
- Published reviews: visible.
- Requested, no answer yet: the request went out; nothing has come back. These read Not written yet.
Each entry shows the rating, the title and text, and when it was submitted.
What you can do
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Publish | Makes the review count towards your average and visible where reviews are shown. |
| Hide | Takes it out of the published set. It stays on the record. |
| Reply | Writes your response under the review. Edit reply changes it afterwards. |
What you cannot do
You cannot write, rewrite or delete a review. Hiding one keeps it on the record rather than erasing it, and a review nobody has written yet cannot be published.
That is deliberate. A rating anyone could edit is worth nothing, including to you.
The average
Your average rating counts published reviews only, so the number always matches what someone can actually read. Hiding a bad review therefore does raise your average, and leaves you with fewer reviews, which readers notice.