Hotel reputation management: what to do and what the software costs

Hotel reputation management means looking after what guests say about you and what the next traveller reads before booking. You read their stories, answer them and get every problem to the person who can fix it. The work is done when the same complaint stops coming back.

I would start with the good reviews that carry one awkward sentence. Among the Lumina Replies examples is a guest at a Grindelwald hotel who in October 2026 writes just 2 things: they loved the mountain view, and the wifi was weak. If you only look at low ratings, that wifi never makes it onto the list of things to fix.

The ones that keep coming back and that your hotel can fix: waiting, cleanliness, wifi, noise, charges discovered at checkout. Between 1 and 8 October 2026 we read 105,887 Google reviews of 277 upmarket hotels, 175 of them Maldives resorts, to see what guests say behind an average of stars.

To count the complaints we went back to the individual reviews of 273 hotels, 104,237 texts. For each subject we counted who mentions it and who criticises it:

Staff draw the most complaints in absolute terms; price, when it comes up, goes wrong more than 4 times in 10. But the figure that changes the work is another: in 3,330 of the 5,427 complaints about price, a service, a room or a breakfast had also gone wrong. Inside “too expensive” there is often a job for a department.

The guest who describes a stained bath and mentions what they paid has already told you where to start. Get the bath checked first. Then look at whether the room you sell on your website promises something that room does not deliver.

With access to the platforms and a shared spreadsheet. You need one person who replies and a name next to every open problem: without the second, the first spends the season apologising for the same things.

I would organise the work like this:

The Grindelwald guest, for example, would go into the sheet as “weak wifi”, with the link to the review and a request to find out which room it was. The public reply is one kind line; the real work ends when someone tests the wifi where the guest was using it.

How many reviews are waiting for a reply and for how long, and which problems come back after you closed them. Keep each platform’s score separate: averaging Google stars with Booking scores hides where the problem comes from.

In our sample, the 209 hotels that reply regularly, meaning at least 10 replies among the reviews we read, answered 58,790 reviews out of 81,967. To those unhappy about price, only 2,547 out of 3,903.

The number of replies on its own says little. At the end of the month I would ask: which complaints came back, who dealt with them, what did we change? And keep count of the new reviews in the period, because 3 complaints in 20 reviews and 3 in 200 are 2 different stories.

From about $75 a month per property, for those who publish a price; the others ask for a demo. This is what the suppliers’ pages said on 20 October 2026, in their own currencies, and they are starting prices:

The cheapest plan does not always do the job you want. In TrustYou the reply assistant comes only with Professional: $198 a month, or $2,376 a year. Lite costs $900 a year, but it has no AI replies.

In Revinate, post-stay surveys require Reputation and add $125 a month per property, plus $100 one-off. I would ask what those one-off charges cover and whether you pay them again for each new property: the page doesn’t say.

Customer Alliance charges each extra unit €29 a month on Core, €78 on Growth and €98 on Pro, and a unit can be a restaurant or spa open to the public. Hotel and restaurant on Core come to €137 a month, €1,644 over the minimum 12 months; the hotel alone starts at €1,296. On another page of the same site a Basic package from €98 still appears, so I would get the plan and its scope written into the quote.

For Birdeye and Reviewpro, ask for a figure for your hotel before comparing them with the rest.

When reviews get lost between platforms, colleagues or properties, or when you need regular surveys and comparisons between departments. If the problem is only writing the replies, I would start with a tool for that.

At the demo I would have them open a real review of your hotel, assign it to a colleague, get the reply approved, post it on the original site and export the problem with its status. Then the same for a second property. The presentation may be beautiful; what matters is who gets the job on Monday morning.

And get it in writing which sites you can post to directly. Customer Alliance, for example, replies from its dashboard on Google, Booking.com, Expedia and HolidayCheck; for other sites it copies the reply and opens the page. “All your reviews in one place” and “post directly everywhere” are 2 different promises.

Lumina Replies writes the replies in your hotel’s voice. It reads the last 60 days of public reviews on Google, Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Expedia; your team adds the facts of the stay, reads it through and posts. The sheet of problems stays yours.

The free account starts with 10 credits, once. Every reply, new version, rewrite with your note or translation costs 1 credit, and you buy credits as you need them, from the tool’s page:

If in a month you write 100 replies and have 20 rewritten, you need 120 credits: the €18 pack. With the 350 pack each reply costs about 13 cents, but you pay €45 up front.

Lumina does not know whether you fixed the wifi, though: that line comes from whoever did the check. For posting, choosing the language and correcting a mistake, see the guide to replying on Booking.com and Tripadvisor.

Reviews do; replies less so. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and that helpful replies help a business stand out; it does not promise higher positions for each reply. Tripadvisor leaves management responses out of its ranking altogether.

AI assistants read reviews too. In the spa conversations we ran on 26 and 27 September 2026, no traveller asked about reviews, yet the assistant went looking for them unprompted for 39 hotels out of 46. And in our study of hotels in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, one hotel dropped out of an itinerary after the traveller asked for recent reviews to be read.

So I would keep 3 things together: what your website promises, what the guest finds and what they say afterwards. If the spa costs extra, say so before booking. If the noise depends on the side of the room, tell whoever allocates rooms. A reply can explain the problem; the next stay has to give the guest something different to tell.