Restaurant reputation management is three habits rather than a project. Ask every guest the same way after the visit, answer what comes back, and read the reviews across your venues for the complaints that repeat. It matters more for a restaurant than for most businesses because the rating sits between the search and the booking. Someone standing on the street at seven o'clock deciding where to eat never opens your website.

What follows is the venue version of that job: where the ask belongs in a service, what Google forbids at the table, which sites are worth the effort, what to write back, and how any of it survives a second and a fourth venue. Most advice on reputation management for restaurants stops at reply politely and ask for reviews, which is true and useless.

What reviews do for a restaurant

Start with the map result. Google's guidance on local ranking lists relevance, distance and prominence, and puts reviews inside prominence: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Prominence itself is "based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have". For a restaurant that covers most of the searching that happens near you.

Then the walk-in. Someone two hundred metres from your door is comparing you with two other places on the same street, and what they see is a rating, a count and the two most recent reviews. A venue with 480 reviews at 4.5 reads as busy. The same venue with 46 reads as untested, whatever the food is like.

Managing restaurant online reviews gets simpler once you accept that both of those happen on Google. Everything after them is a decision about who eats with you.

When to ask a guest for a review, and why never at the table

Ask after the visit is over. Two moments work: shortly after the bill closes, while the guest is in the taxi or walking home, and the next morning, which suits a long dinner and not a lunch. Either beats a week later, when the meal has blurred into every other meal.

The table itself is out, and not because it is awkward. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy, read on 6 September 2026, says under rating manipulation: "When soliciting reviews, merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included."

Read that closely, because most articles get it wrong in one direction or the other. It is not a ban on a review link existing inside your building. A QR code on the bill folder is fine, and Google's own tips page says that "to leave reviews, you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code". What is banned is a person standing there while the guest types. A tablet on the pass, a server waiting for the phone to come out: that is pressure on the premises, and it is how you end up with a page of five-word reviews that read like they were written under supervision.

The same policy bans the other shortcut. Merchants may not "offer incentives ... in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review", so a free dessert for a five-star breaches it however friendly the sign is. Nor may you sort your guests: sending happy diners to Google and unhappy ones to a private form is review gating, which the policy covers under "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". Ask everyone the same way at the same point.

Let the till or the booking system decide the moment

An ask that depends on somebody remembering stops on a busy Saturday, which is the night you most want reviewed. Hang it off something that already happens.

The till is the obvious trigger, because payment is the one event every seated guest generates. Cloutly connects to Square and Clover for this: Square can fire on "Payment received" or on "Order completed and payment received", Clover on "Payment Completed", and you choose how long after that the message goes out. A booking system reaches the same place through Zapier, so a completed reservation can be the trigger instead if that suits your floor better.

What matters more than the trigger is what the ask does with a regular. Someone who eats with you fortnightly should be one contact asked once, not one ask per visit, and a guest who reviewed you two months ago should not be asked again on their next booking. Cloutly holds one contact per person, moves the send time when they book again rather than adding a second ask, skips anyone who has reviewed you in the last 90 days, and stops the follow-ups the moment a review lands.

No till reaches the walk-in who paid cash. That is what a QR on the bill folder is for, and it is the honest limit of automation in a dining room. More of this is on our hospitality page.

Which sites to send guests to

Two, for almost every venue. Google takes the ask at every venue, on every service. Tripadvisor takes the second ask if travellers are a real share of your covers, and nothing at all if your room is mostly regulars from three suburbs. Check your bookings before you decide which you are.

Then stop, because the rules stop you. OpenTable asks the diner itself the day after a seated booking. Yelp tells businesses never to ask. Zomato answers selective asking with a public disclaimer on your own page telling diners your reviews look suspicious. Which sites allow the ask, which punish it and what each lets you say back are in restaurant review sites: the 9 that matter. The wording of the ask itself is in how to get more Google reviews.

The complaints every venue gets, and what a reply has to do

The negatives repeat. The wait, cold food, noise, price, a member of staff, and a booking that went wrong: after a few hundred reviews you can name the complaint before you have finished reading it. The star ratings vary. The complaints do not.

A reply that works takes about ninety seconds. It uses the guest's name, says plainly which part of their account is true, names the change in one sentence if there is one, and offers a way back that is a person rather than a form. Google's reply guidance adds a rule that catches restaurants: be "conversational, not promotional", because "your reviewers are already customers". Putting right one bad night is not a promotion. Closing every reply with a discount code is.

Two rules are specific to hospitality.

Answer the one-shot sites when you are calm. Google lets you edit a reply after it publishes. Tripadvisor does not: "At this time, it's not possible to edit a management response. However, you can delete a response and then submit a new one in its place." Deleting pulls your answer off the review straight away, so the reply you type at eleven at night either stays or leaves the review bare while you write another.

Never trade a comp for a review coming down. Making good on a bad night is fine and expected. Offering a meal in exchange for a revision is the same breach as buying the review outright, and Google's policy names both in one sentence.

Here are three templates for complaints venue-specific enough that generic advice fails on them. The wait, the price and a complaint about a person already have worked examples in review response examples, and ten written for the Tripadvisor format are in how to respond to a bad Tripadvisor review. Every business below is invented.

Noise: "we could not hear each other"

Thanks for the review, Marianne. The room is brick and glass and it gets loud the moment it fills, which is a fair thing to be annoyed about and not something you should have to shout through. The two booths along the back wall are the quietest tables we have and they are yours if you ring and ask for them. We have also brought the music down after seven, which will not change the room but it takes the edge off. Rosa, Owner, Bramble & Rye

Noise is the complaint owners answer worst, because the honest answer is that the room is the room. Do not promise an acoustic rebuild. Offer the quiet table, name the one thing you changed, stop.

Cold food, when the guest said nothing at the time

Thanks for writing this, Owen. The pork should not have reached you cold, and it is not on you to have flagged it at the time, so I am not going to ask why you didn't. That plate sat on the pass while a table of twelve went out, which is a service problem and not a kitchen one. The pass is split between the two sections from this week. Ring the restaurant and ask for me and dinner is on us next time. Callum, General Manager, Bramble & Rye

The instinct to write "we wish you had told us at the time" is strong and always wrong in public. It reads as blame. Take the point, name where the failure sat, and leave the invitation unattached to the review.

A booking or a function that went wrong

Thanks for writing, Ellery. Fourteen people booked six weeks out and then split across two rooms on the night is not a mix-up, it is us not reading our own diary. The function sheet now goes to the floor manager on the Monday of that week instead of the morning of, so a room can be held properly. Your deposit went back to the card that paid it on Tuesday. If you will let us have the birthday next year, ask for me and I will run it myself. Tam, Floor Manager, Bramble & Rye

Booking failures produce the angriest reviews a venue gets, because the guest planned around you and told other people to come. The refund goes before the apology, and the process change is what stops the next one. More of what a reply should never say is in examples of bad reviews.

Give the floor the credit, inside the rule you just read

Guests name people. "Marianne looked after us all night" is the most common shape a five-star restaurant review takes, and it is worth more to the person named than any roster note.

There is a rule sitting under the on-premises one that almost nobody in hospitality has read. In the screenshot above, Google lists among the things merchants may not do "requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews" and "requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member". A target of ten reviews a shift is out. So is asking guests to mention Marianne by name.

What is left is arithmetic you do afterwards. Give each person their own review link or QR code and the reviews arriving through it are counted to them, with nothing asked of the guest. Cloutly reads it that way on its staff recognition board, and where there is no personal link it falls back to matching names in the review text and says so in the product: name matching fills the gaps, it can credit the wrong person, and it can miss a review that names nobody.

That caveat is the useful part. Two Georges on the floor and no review text will tell them apart. Personal links fix that, and a board read out at a Monday briefing beats one nobody opens.

Read every venue's reviews for the theme, not the score

A rating tells you something is wrong. It never tells you what. Hospitality reputation management at more than one venue is mostly the work of turning a few thousand reviews into the two or three things worth fixing this month.

Do it by counting rather than by feel. Take a quarter of reviews per venue, count how many mention each recurring complaint, and put those counts beside each venue's total review count so a busy site is not punished for volume. Look for a theme heavy at one venue and light at the others: that is an operational difference you can go and stand in, rather than a fact about your food.

Cloutly does this as Signals, against ten hospitality themes: Food & drink, Service, Bookings & entry, Price & value, Cleanliness, Venue & facilities, Safety, Events & functions, Digital & contact, and Other. It reads by venue as well as by theme, carries the denominator on every number and a verbatim quote under every signal, and marks a venue with too few reviews in the window as thin instead of pretending the number means something. Our team switches it on for an account rather than you enabling it yourself, so ask us.

Restaurant reputation management across a group

Nothing above gets harder at four venues. It gets repetitive, which is a different problem with a different fix.

Each venue has its own Google Business Profile, its own Facebook Page and its own Tripadvisor listing with its own identity check. No single reply box answers for a group, and a tool claiming otherwise is describing an inbox rather than a shortcut. What you can standardise is the ask: same trigger, same delay, same wording, so a guest at your newest site gets the same message at the same point as a guest at your first. Merivale is one of the restaurant groups that manages its reviews in Cloutly.

Decide who replies before you roll anything out. Head office replying to everything is consistent and reads like a call centre. The venue replying to everything is warm and stops dead in a busy December. What survives is the venue manager replying, with head office writing the four or five answers to the complaints that repeat and checking they go out. The argument in full, league table included, is in multi-location review management.

Frequently asked questions

How do restaurants get more Google reviews?

By asking every guest the same way, shortly after the bill or the next morning, with the ask hung off something automatic like the till rather than a person remembering. Google encourages asking and suggests a link or a QR code. It bans incentives, and it bans sorting guests by how happy they are.

Can a restaurant ask for a review at the table?

Not by standing over the guest. Google's policy says merchants should not require or pressure users to leave reviews while on the premises, or ask for specific content. A QR code on the bill folder that the guest uses later is fine. A server waiting while they type is not.

Should a restaurant reply to every review?

Reply to every negative one, and to positive reviews that name a person or a dish. Answering everything is a nice ambition and the first thing to lapse in December. Write your Tripadvisor responses when you are calm, because you cannot edit one after it publishes, only delete it and start again.

Who should reply to reviews in a restaurant group?

The venue manager, with head office writing the standard answers to the complaints that repeat and checking the replies go out. Head office replying to everything reads like a call centre, and the venue replying alone stops during service peaks. Splitting it survives both.

Google is the restaurant review site that decides. It is where the search ends for most diners, and its rating is the one they compare. The other eight restaurant review sites worth knowing in 2026 matter for narrower reasons, and one of them will put a public warning on your page if you collect reviews the wrong way.

What separates these platforms is not audience size. It is who may post, and whether you are allowed to ask. Yelp tells businesses never to ask. Zomato answers selective asking with a public disclaimer on your page telling diners your reviews look suspicious. OpenTable does the asking for you and will not accept a review from anyone who did not book through OpenTable and turn up. Most lists of restaurant review sites name the same platforms and skip all of that.

This is the hospitality version of our guide to review sites for businesses. Every rule below was read off the platform's own help or policy pages on 6 September 2026.

The 9 restaurant review sites, and who you may ask

The sites anyone can post to are mostly the ones you may ask on, and the sites that check a real visit ask on your behalf. So the list of places a restaurant should chase reviews is much shorter than the list of places it should be listed.

Google restaurant reviews

Google is barely a restaurant review site. It is the layer above them, and anyone can post. The only gate is that customers "must be signed into a Google Account to leave a review", and one can be set up with a non-Gmail address.

Google also wants you to ask. Its tips to get more reviews say that "to leave reviews, you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code". What it bans is paying for the answer: "offering incentives, like free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for customers to post reviews ... is considered fake & misleading content and is strictly prohibited". A free dessert for five stars breaches that, whatever the sign on the counter calls it.

Google also lets you edit or delete a reply after it publishes. Zomato and OpenTable never do, so Google is the one site here where a reply written at eleven on a Saturday night can be fixed on Sunday.

Tripadvisor restaurant reviews

Tripadvisor is where the traveller decides. If a real share of your covers are people who do not live within ten minutes of your door, it is your second site and it is not close.

You may ask, and Tripadvisor would rather you answered. Its management response guidelines say owners "can and should respond by adding a Management Response", posted "directly underneath the traveler review" and "visible to anyone looking at the website".

What gets a response rejected, and replies worth copying, are in how to respond to Tripadvisor reviews; how to ask for one is in how to get more Tripadvisor reviews.

Yelp restaurant reviews and ratings

Yelp carries real weight for restaurants in US markets and close to none elsewhere, so whether it belongs on your list is a geography question. The costly mistake is asking, and Yelp buries the rule in the conflicts-of-interest bullet of its content guidelines.

So Yelp is a site you read and answer, never one you feed.

Answering is simple once the page is claimed. Yelp says that "if you've claimed your business page, you can reply to your reviews by clicking Respond, Direct message, or both", and that "responses are public and appear below the review". When one needs to come down instead, what actually works on a Yelp review covers the grounds that succeed.

Facebook restaurant reviews

Facebook still earns its place for a suburban venue, where the local audience genuinely lives and the Page often does more work than the website.

The rating is a Recommendation percentage rather than stars, and anyone logged in can leave one. Meta does "not verify that users purchased the product or used the service that they are reviewing".

Two rules decide whether the number on your Page moves at all. Meta says "a Page may not have a rating if it hasn't received at least five reviews", and that "only recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating". So a regular who writes something lovely and posts it to friends only has changed nothing.

Meta publishes no rule on asking, and nothing at all on how a Page replies. The settings path is in Facebook reviews for business.

OpenTable reviews

OpenTable is the closed loop, and it behaves differently from everything above it.

Only a diner who ate can review you. OpenTable's help centre is explicit: "only diners who booked and honored a reservation through OpenTable can leave a review", tied to that reservation in the account that booked it. The diner signs into that account, opens their past reservations, picks the one they want to review and leaves star ratings, written comments, optional photos and an optional private note to you. Moderation can take up to 72 business hours. Diners can edit or delete their own review afterwards, but a deleted one cannot be replaced.

A cancelled booking gets no review option. Neither does a guest who came along on somebody else's reservation, or anyone who rang you directly or walked in.

That is why your OpenTable review count looks thin beside your covers. On a 120-cover Saturday where thirty tables came through OpenTable, thirty diners get asked and ninety do not. Star-only ratings count towards your score but never appear on the public profile. And the Ratings and Reviews section does not show at all until you have been listed 30 days or collected ten reviews with comments, whichever lands first.

You do not send the request. OpenTable sends it the day after the reservation is marked seated, or automatically updated to assumed seated, by email and push notification. The operator's lever is not the ask. It is making sure bookings actually run through OpenTable and get marked seated on the night. Correct a no-show to seated after the fact and the guest can still review from their account, they just never get prompted.

The reply rules are the strictest of the nine.

• One public response per review. Everything after that goes privately to the guest.
• No editing, ever. Responses "won't be removed regardless of mistakes, including typos or posting the response to the wrong review".
• Public responses show on your OpenTable profile on the desktop site only, not in the app.
• You can reply privately to a star-only rating that carries no comment, and that reply is not published.
• Links and email addresses are allowed in private responses and not in public ones.

The rating window catches people out too. In the United States, Canada and Mexico the score runs on a rolling 120 days, and outside North America on 365, counted from the reservation date rather than the date the guest wrote.

Report a review that breaks the rules to reviews@opentable.com, with the text, the dining date and your reason. What OpenTable will not have is you going round the outside: "never directly contact a guest to ask them to remove or alter a review."

Zomato reviews

Check the market before you spend a minute here. Zomato's home page on 6 September 2026 calls it "India's #1 food delivery app", covering 800-plus cities. If your venue is not in India, Zomato is not your list, whatever a 2022 article told you.

Where it does operate, anyone with an account can review and Zomato polices it after the fact. Its guidelines for restaurants are the bluntest of the nine. "Selective solicitation is a strict NO." So is offering freebies, asking staff to compete with each other to collect reviews, and hiring anyone who offers to fix your ratings.

The penalty is the part nobody quotes: "we will activate a disclaimer on your restaurant's page, informing the Zomato community that your reviews are suspicious." No other platform on this list punishes asking in public, on your own page, where your next customer will read it.

You get one management response, and Zomato's warning about it is worth taking literally: "your response can't be edited after posting, so choose your words well."

Uber Eats, DoorDash and delivery ratings

A delivery rating is not a restaurant review, and treating it as one is how kitchens end up chasing a number they cannot move.

DoorDash publishes the most detail. A public review tied to an order carries a "Verified Order" label, and only customers in selected US, Canada and Australia markets can leave one. The scale is not stars: it is Loved, Liked or Didn't Like, with tags for parts of the experience. You reply privately, from the Merchant Portal, within seven days. There is no public reply and no opt-out, and reviews that "focus primarily on delivery issues (such as delivery time or food temperature), which are outside a merchant's control" may be rejected in moderation.

Uber Eats cannot be described honestly from the outside. Uber's merchant help centre demands a "log in with your store's account" before it will show its articles on customer feedback, so this piece will not tell you what that dashboard offers. Open Uber Eats Manager and look.

The Infatuation, and the sites you cannot work

The Infatuation is on this list for a different reason: it is real, and there is nothing you can do about it. Its reviews are staff-written and scored out of ten across a handful of cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and San Francisco. There is nothing to claim and nowhere to reply.

Other directories older guides still name have quietly closed, Foursquare's city guide among them; the dead ones are listed here. For whatever survives, the test is whether a diner has ever mentioned it. If not, keep the listing accurate and stop.

Where to send the ask

Concentrating the ask beats spreading it. A venue with 300 Google reviews and 8 on Tripadvisor reads as busy. The same venue with 40 spread over six platforms reads as quiet everywhere.

Google takes the ask at every venue, on every service. Tripadvisor takes it second, but only if travellers are a real share of your covers: a harbourside bistro like Bramble & Rye sends the ask there, a suburban pizzeria three streets from the station does not. Nowhere else, by design. OpenTable has already asked, Yelp forbids it, and Zomato will label your page for it.

Ask every diner the same way at the same point after the meal. Never build a step that routes happy diners to the review link and unhappy ones to a private form: that is review gating, and Google's prohibited content policy tells merchants not to "selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". The timing that works is in how to get more Google reviews.

Running this across several venues

Nothing here lets you answer once for a group. Each venue has its own Google Business Profile, its own Facebook Page needing five reviews before a rating appears, its own Tripadvisor listing and its own OpenTable profile, so a four-venue group is four logins per platform.

Sort the queue by how permanent the reply is rather than by how bad the review is. Google is editable; Zomato and OpenTable are not, and OpenTable will not take a response down even when you post it under the wrong review. Answer the one-shot sites when you are calm and Google whenever you have ten minutes.

Then fix the listings before you widen the list of sites. Most one-star reviews at multi-venue groups are about a locked door, a wrong number, or hours that changed at Easter and never changed back. Our worked examples of bad reviews show what those replies look like, and the whole programme across venues is in restaurant reputation management.

If reading them all is the bottleneck, that is what software is for. Cloutly reads 39 review sites, Google, Facebook, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Booking.com and Zomato among them, brings every venue's reviews into one inbox you can filter by location, and publishes hours, phone and address to Google Business Profile and Facebook while watching Yelp, Tripadvisor and Google's public view for drift. OpenTable and the delivery apps are not among the 39, so you still open those yourself. More for venues is on our hospitality page.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best restaurant review site?

Google, for almost every restaurant in almost every market. It is the only one here that both encourages you to ask customers and lets you edit your reply afterwards.

Can a restaurant ask customers for reviews?

That depends on the site. Google encourages it and suggests a link or a QR code. Yelp tells businesses never to ask. Zomato answers selective asking with a public disclaimer on your page. OpenTable sends the request itself the day after a seated reservation. Offering a discount or a free item in exchange is banned by Google outright.

How do I leave a review on OpenTable?

Sign into the OpenTable account that made the booking, open your past reservations, choose the meal and follow the prompts on the site or in the app. You can only review a reservation you booked through OpenTable and turned up to, so a cancelled booking or a table someone else reserved gives you no option.

Do Uber Eats and DoorDash ratings affect my Google rating?

No. They are separate scores on storefronts those platforms own, tied to a delivery order rather than to a profile you control, and they never appear in the Google result a diner sees when they search your restaurant by name.

A Tripadvisor rating is the bubble score shown on your listing. Popularity ranking is your position against similar businesses in the same destination. They are related, but they are not the same calculation. That is why a hotel's rating can stay at 4.5 while its local rank moves from 12th to 9th, or the other way around.

Tripadvisor says popularity ranking is based on four things: review quality, recency, quantity and consistency. It recalculates the ranking daily and compares a business with its local competitors.

Rating and popularity ranking are different

The rating is an easy summary for a traveller. Popularity ranking is a relative position, such as number 8 of 143 hotels in a destination.

The second row is where confusion starts. You can improve and still fall if nearby competitors improve faster. You can also climb without a visible change in the bubble score because recent, consistent reviews affect the relative ranking before the rounded display moves.

The four ranking inputs

Tripadvisor explains the inputs in its popularity-ranking guide.

Quality

Higher review scores help. There is no credible shortcut around the experience itself. A queue at check-in, a room that does not match the photographs or a bill nobody can explain will surface in reviews no matter how polished the request is.

Recency

Newer reviews carry more weight than older ones. A strong year from long ago does not protect a venue forever, and a difficult month does not define it forever either. Recent reviews tell travellers and Tripadvisor what the experience is like now.

Quantity

Tripadvisor needs enough reviews to compare businesses with statistical confidence. More reviews can help, but raw volume does not beat quality. A venue cannot bury repeated poor experiences under a large campaign and expect the ranking to ignore them.

Consistency

A steady pattern is more convincing than bursts separated by silence. That does not mean forcing a quota. It means giving every eligible guest the same honest opportunity to review at a sensible point in the journey.

Why your rating stayed the same

Tripadvisor displays a rounded rating. The underlying numbers can change without crossing the next visible threshold. A new five-star review may improve the average but leave the page showing 4.5. A low score may reduce the average without immediately changing that display.

At the same time, popularity rank can move because:

• your recent mix changed
• a nearby competitor received new reviews
• the comparison set changed
• several days of review activity altered the consistency pattern
• the daily ranking calculation caught up with recent submissions

Do not reverse-engineer a hidden formula from one day's movement. Tripadvisor does not publish the weights or a calculator, and any article offering an exact equation is guessing.

Do management responses improve the ranking?

No direct boost is promised. Tripadvisor says management responses are not a popularity-ranking factor.

They still matter. A measured response helps the next traveller understand what happened, shows that the property is paying attention and gives you room to explain a genuine change. That is a conversion and trust job, not a ranking trick.

Tripadvisor's management-response guidance also makes an operational point: a response can be deleted and submitted again, but it cannot simply be edited after publication. Check names, dates and promises before sending it.

For worked replies, use how to respond to a bad Tripadvisor review. If the review appears to break a rule, follow the Tripadvisor removal process rather than arguing about it in public.

What a venue can improve this month

Start with the review language, not the rank.

1. Read the newest 30 reviews and tag repeated themes.
2. Separate one-off complaints from patterns.
3. Give each pattern to someone who can change the operation.
4. Reply where context or service recovery helps a future guest.
5. Invite eligible guests consistently, without incentives or rating selection.
6. Review the trend monthly rather than reacting to daily movement.

If “friendly staff” appears every week, recognise the team and protect what is working. If “nobody answered at night” appears across several reviews, fix the contact expectation. If complaints jump between properties, analyse them by location rather than hiding them inside a group average.

Can you calculate how many reviews you need?

You can calculate how new scores affect a simple arithmetic average. You cannot calculate a guaranteed Tripadvisor popularity position because the published method is relative and the weights are not public.

That distinction saves a lot of pointless spreadsheet work. Use arithmetic to understand the displayed average, and use operations to improve the things guests keep describing. The hotel review-site guide shows where Tripadvisor sits beside Google and booking platforms.

The useful way to read the numbers

Watch three things together:

• the visible rating over time
• popularity rank against the right local comparison set
• the themes inside recent reviews

The first tells you the summary. The second tells you how you compare. The third tells you what to do next. Only the third one gives the morning meeting something it can actually fix.

Most hotels need to pay close attention to five places: Google, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, the Expedia Group network and Facebook. The order changes by market and distribution mix, but the job does not. Keep the profile accurate, understand who can leave a review, respond where guests will read it and do not ask for something the platform forbids.

You do not need another list of 30 travel websites. You need to know which five deserve a place in the weekly operating rhythm.

The short list

Google and Tripadvisor are public discovery surfaces. Booking.com and Expedia reviews sit much closer to the booking decision because the guest is already comparing rooms and rates. Facebook matters most where the Page has a real local audience. Treating them as interchangeable creates messy reporting and worse requests.

Google

Google is usually the first profile to fix because its rating appears beside the hotel's map result, photos, phone number and booking options. Guests do not need to have booked through Google to review, which makes the profile broad and easy to use.

Check the primary category, map pin, phone, website, check-in and check-out times, amenities and photos. Then create the hotel's Google review link and use it consistently after stays. Google allows review requests but prohibits incentives, fake engagement and selective practices that distort the rating. Its review guidance covers the request link and incentive rule.

If the hotel has several properties, work location by location. A group average can hide a broken breakfast service in one building and a front-desk team doing exceptional work in another.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor is still its own operating channel, not just another star score. It shows both a traveller rating and a popularity ranking relative to nearby properties. Those numbers can move differently, which is why teams often think something is wrong when the displayed rating stays flat but the rank changes.

Claim the listing, keep property details current and answer substantive reviews. Tripadvisor's ranking uses the quality, recency, quantity and consistency of reviews, not management-response volume. The full explanation is in how Tripadvisor ratings and rankings work.

Tripadvisor permits its own review-collection tools and links. Keep the invitation neutral. Do not offer a free drink, late checkout or competition entry for a review.

Booking.com

Booking.com reviews come through the booking relationship, so they carry a different kind of proof from an open review site. The platform invites eligible guests after their stay under its own guest review process.

The hotel should concentrate on the parts it controls: accurate property information, expectations before arrival, service recovery during the stay and a useful public response afterwards. Do not send a separate campaign pretending that anyone can leave a Booking.com review. Eligibility belongs to Booking.com.

Look at review sub-scores and recurring language, not only the headline number. “Clean room, impossible check-in” is an operations note hiding inside a good average.

Expedia, Hotels.com and Orbitz

Expedia, Hotels.com and Orbitz are Expedia Group brands. They should be monitored as a network rather than counted as three unrelated reputation programmes. Expedia Group's official brand list shows the relationship.

Expedia says its reviews come from verified travellers after a completed stay, and its property systems support management responses. Its reviews documentation says the company solicits feedback after checkout.

For the hotel team, the practical work is familiar: correct content, clean distribution data, prompt issue handling and a response that tells the next guest what changed. Do not assume one reply appears identically across every brand and market. Check the live property page.

Facebook

Facebook Recommendations are useful when the hotel already has an active Page, runs events or serves a strong local market. They are less central for a property whose demand comes almost entirely through travel search and online travel agencies.

Keep the Page details and Message button honest. If nobody checks Messenger overnight, say when it is read or turn Page messaging off and show the booking or front-desk contact instead. The Facebook reviews guide explains Recommendations and their controls.

Do not spread the team across every directory

Add another review site to the weekly list only when at least one of these is true:

• it sends bookings you can identify
• it ranks for the hotel or destination in your market
• guests repeatedly mention it at the property
• the hotel has an accurate, claimable profile there
• a distribution agreement makes it operationally important

A smaller list with clear ownership beats a dashboard full of profiles nobody acts on.

A weekly review routine

Give one person responsibility for the queue, with cover for days off.

1. Check new reviews by property and source.
2. Escalate safety, discrimination, privacy and active-stay issues immediately.
3. Reply to reviews where a response helps the next guest.
4. Tag recurring themes such as check-in, noise, cleanliness and breakfast.
5. Send the relevant theme to the person who can change it.
6. Check that the property's contact and booking details are still correct.

For a group, a shared inbox makes the queue easier to own, but the reply should still sound like the hotel. The broader hospitality reputation approach is useful when the problem spans several venues or properties.

The aim is not to collect the same review everywhere. It is to understand where each review comes from and do the work that particular platform lets the hotel do.