How to get more Google reviews for a hotel or restaurant

There is a particular frustration in hospitality: a guest tells you at checkout that it was the best weekend they have had in years, and then leaves no trace of it anywhere. They meant it. They simply went back to their life.

Almost every property has more goodwill than reviews. Closing that gap is mostly a logistics problem, and the fixes are unglamorous.

Why happy guests do not leave reviews

Three reasons, in order of how much they cost you:

• Nobody asked. The single largest cause. Guests do not consider it their job.
• It was asked at the wrong moment. At checkout the guest is holding luggage and thinking about a taxi. Three weeks later they have forgotten the room number.
• It took more than one tap. Every step between the ask and the review box loses people. “Search for us on Google and leave a review” is four or five steps, and most of them are lost at the first.

Complaints, by contrast, are self-motivating. Nobody has to prompt an unhappy guest. That asymmetry is why a property that never asks drifts downwards over time even when most stays go well. The sample that reaches the internet is selected for dissatisfaction.

Get the link right first

Before any campaign, fix the mechanics. Google provides a short link that opens the review box directly, with the star selector already up:

1. Open your Google Business Profile as an owner or manager.
2. Find Ask for reviews and copy the short g.page link.
3. Use that link everywhere. Do not send people to your listing, your website, or a search result.

Then put it where a guest will actually meet it: the post-stay email, the bottom of the receipt, a small card at reception, a QR code on the table tent. A QR code that opens the review box in one scan converts far better than any wording improvement you could make.

When to ask

The best moment is when the guest has just had the good experience and still has their phone in their hand, not as they leave, and not a fortnight later.

One ask, and at most one reminder. A third message stops being a request and becomes pestering, and it is the kind of thing guests mention in the review you eventually get.

How to ask, in words that work

Short, specific, and honest about what it is for. Something like:

“Thanks for staying with us. If you have a minute, a short Google review genuinely helps other travellers work out whether we are right for them, and it tells us what to keep doing. [Leave a review]”

What makes that work is the absence of a few things. It does not ask for five stars. It does not say “if you enjoyed your stay”, which is a soft form of gating. It does not bundle in a survey, a newsletter sign-up and a loyalty scheme. And it has exactly one link.

Where staff ask in person, give them one sentence and the QR card. Asking is a skill nobody has unless someone shows them what to say once.

What will get your listing penalised

Google’s policies here are stricter than most properties assume, and enforcement lands on the business, not the guest.

• Incentives. A free drink, a discount, a prize draw entry, all prohibited, including when you ask for an honest review rather than a positive one.
• Gating. Asking “how was your stay?” and routing only the happy answers to Google is explicitly against policy, and it is what a lot of feedback tools quietly did for years.
• Buying reviews, or writing them. Obvious, still common, and increasingly detectable through patterns rather than content.
• Kiosk bulk collection. A tablet at reception producing dozens of reviews from one network tends to get them filtered wholesale.

The penalty is rarely a dramatic ban. It is quieter: reviews stop appearing, the ones you gathered disappear in a sweep, and nobody tells you why. Properties often discover it when their count drops.

Making it a habit rather than a campaign

Most properties do this properly for a month. The volume rises, everyone is pleased, and then it stops, and because recency is weighted, the benefit decays. A modest, permanent process beats an energetic temporary one.

Pick the one channel you can actually sustain, usually the post-stay email, and automate it. Put the QR card out and keep it stocked. Then check the numbers monthly rather than daily, because daily checking is how people burn out on it.

And answer what arrives. A property that collects reviews and ignores them looks worse than one that never asked. See how to reply to negative reviews for the four sentences that do the job, and why the rating gatekeeps before anyone reads a word for what all this is ultimately buying you.