Replying to reviews faster

Answering a review is worth more than writing a good one. A reply is the only part of the page you control, it is read by the next person deciding whether to book you, and on most platforms it is the only signal you can send that someone is paying attention.

Two numbers decide whether you’re doing it: how many reviews you answer at all, and how long people wait. Insights → Reply rates shows both, per outlet, and names the one thing most worth fixing.

For how a draft gets written, edited and published, see responding to reviews. This article is about the gap between the reviews that arrive and the ones that get answered.

Read the report

The card at the top of the page is the verdict: the biggest gap, with the number behind it, linking to the section here that fixes it. Under it:

• Answered within 48 hours — the headline. The ring is the share of reviews in the period that got a reply inside 48 hours, with the change against the period before it. Beside it: your median time to reply, the share answered at all, and how many are open right now.
• Time to reply — under 24 hours, 24–48 hours, 2–7 days, more than 7 days, still open. This is where a good-looking average falls apart: a median of 20 hours with eleven reviews in the “more than 7 days” bar means most are quick and a handful were abandoned.
• Who is answering — the same figures per outlet, per platform, and per star rating. At a group account this is the table that matters: one property answering 40% will drag a whole brand’s average down while every other property looks fine.
• How replies got written — draft used as-is, draft edited, written from scratch, or posted straight on the platform.
• Waiting for a reply — everything still unanswered, oldest first, with the star rating and whether a draft is already sitting there. This is a work queue, not a chart. Click a row to open the review.

Filter the page by date range, platform and star rating. The report goes back through your history, so you can see what last quarter looked like.

Answer every review

If the verdict says most reviews go unanswered, nothing else on this page matters yet. Speed is a refinement; coverage is the thing.

Give it to one person, once a day. Reply rates collapse when answering reviews is everybody’s job. Ten minutes, same time each day, one named person per property — that alone usually takes a workspace from half-answered to nearly complete, because the drafts are already written.

Work the Waiting list from the top. It is ordered oldest first for a reason. The oldest review is the one most likely to be read by someone who is still deciding, and the one where a reply reads worst if it never comes.

Don’t skip the short ones. A four-star review with no text still deserves a line. They’re fast, they’re most of the volume, and platforms weigh the reply rate on your whole profile, not on the interesting reviews.

Answer the ones that came in while you were away. New reviews arrive on each sync, so a week off means a queue. Check the Waiting list before anything else when you come back.

Reply within 48 hours

48 hours is the standard this report measures against. It isn’t arbitrary: it’s roughly how long a review stays near the top of your profile, and how long a guest still remembers writing it.

The clock starts the day the guest posted, not when we noticed. That’s what the 48 hours means to the person who wrote the review, and it’s the number your guests and your owners will hold you to. Sync runs daily, so up to a day of that window can be gone before the review reaches you — check daily and it won’t matter.

Check once a day, not once a week. A daily habit puts almost everything in the “under 24 hours” bar. A weekly one puts almost everything in “2–7 days” no matter how good the replies are.

Use the draft that’s already there. It’s written by the time you open the review. Reading and adjusting it takes a fraction of the time that starting from a blank box does, and the report shows which of the two you’re doing — if “written from scratch” is most of your replies, you’re paying for the drafts and not using them.

Watch the long tail, not the average. Fix the “more than 7 days” bar first. Those reviews are the ones customers actually notice went unanswered, and each one drags your median more than a dozen fast replies pull it back.

Answer the angry ones first

The most common pattern in this report: four and five star reviews answered quickly, one and two star reviews left for days. It’s human — the good ones are easy to write. It’s also backwards.

A negative review with no reply reads as true. A negative review with a calm, specific reply from the business reads as an incident that was handled, and it’s the reply that the next reader remembers. The Who is answering → By rating table tells you whether you’re doing this, and the star filter on the Waiting list gives you the 1–2 star queue on its own.

Do the 1–2 star reviews first, every day. Before the five-star ones, not after.

Answer within a day, not two. This is the one case where 48 hours is already slow.

Don’t argue, and don’t paste the same thing twice. Name what went wrong, say what changed, and offer a way to continue the conversation off the public page. Repetition is obvious to anyone scrolling your profile, which is another reason to start from the draft — it’s written against that specific review.

Check whether the unhappy guest also sent you a survey response. If they did, the fix may already be a resolution you can offer rather than words on a review page. See how resolutions work.

Use the drafts

If “posted on the platform” is most of your replies, the report still counts them — we read owner replies straight from Google, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Expedia and Booking.com on each sync, so replying in Google’s console is not invisible here.

What you lose by working that way is the speed and the consistency. The draft is ready when the review lands, so using it is faster than writing one; and when several people reply in several consoles, the tone drifts and the same complaint gets three different answers. Working from the Waiting list also means nothing gets forgotten, which is the failure mode that produces the “more than 7 days” bar.

Note that a reply you post directly on a platform shows up here after the next sync, so give it up to a day before checking the report.

Why some replies have no measured time

Some answered reviews show as answered, time unknown. They count towards the share answered, and never towards the 48-hour figure. Two reasons:

• The platform gave us the reply text but no date. Booking.com does this: we can see the property answered, but not when.
• The reply was approved in the app before 20 September 2026, when reply timing started being recorded.

Everything else is measured, imported history included. Because both dates come from the platform itself — when the guest posted, and when the owner replied — a review from 2019 answered three days later is a real three-day reply, whether we crawled it last month or last year. Your history is evidence, not a gap.

What the report will not tell you

Who replied. There’s no per-person breakdown, deliberately. The unit is the outlet.

Whether the reply was any good. Speed and coverage are measurable; quality isn’t, and a fast bad reply is worse than a slow good one.

Whether it’s actually posted. FeedbackRobot drafts replies and you publish them. Approving a reply marks it answered here — if you don’t paste it into the platform’s console, the review is still publicly unanswered while this report says it’s handled. If your reply rate looks good and your Google profile looks empty, that’s the gap. See responding to reviews.