Why so few reviews for Happy Oak Villa on VRBO?
I received essentially the same question from two different prospective guests on VRBO in the same week recently. They wanted to know:
“I’m wondering why there are so few reviews for this property (Happy Oak Villa) on VRBO. Why aren’t there any recent ones?”
My original response was too long, so I shortened it up for my reply to the guest, but felt that it might make for interesting reading on our blog, so here it is:
The reason there aren’t any up-to-date reviews is because we haven’t had many VRBO bookings at this property!
We’ve only been renting it for three years, but we have been renting our other two properties for sixteen years, and we’ve had a total of about 750 different guest bookings over the years. We get a good number of repeat guests, and they book via other means.
For example, when we introduced this property, the first guest the first year stayed two months, the first guest the next year stayed three months, and the guest after them stayed two, so nearly half the year was gone by and we had had only two guests who had booked elsewhere and couldn’t leave a review on VRBO.
With a fairly solid group of repeat guests who had been staying with us for years, all interested in trying out this, our third and newest property, they kind of filled up the calendar quite a bit for the first two years without booking through VRBO.
And once a guest has stayed three or four times, they don’t tend to leave reviews as much. How many times can you say something was great and wonderful without starting to sound repetitive? So many of them are less inclined to leave reviews. But again, they can’t leave them here because this isn’t how it was booked.
Sometimes things just go wrong
Last year however, something else affected bookings on VRBO in a manner I never expected.
The vast majority of our guests book relatively far in advance compared to normal vacation rental guests, which means that they pay an initial deposit, with the balance being due eight weeks before arrival. I had noticed that there seemed to be fewer bookings for this property, which I found strange, but couldn’t understand why, until one evening I got a message with a question, which stunned and frustrated me. Just like what you have done, the guest asked a simple question, which was this: How come I can’t book this property with a just a deposit? Why do I have to pay the entire balance for a booking eight months in advance? I don’t want to put out that large an amount of money so far ahead of time!!
I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I’ve used VRBO for fourteen years, and we’ve never required a 100% full payment so far in advance of a guest’s arrival. But I checked out what the guest was seeing on the site, and there it was… Terms for this property: Pay 100% up front, no matter how far in advance. Truthfully I was really angry. I knew when I had first setup the property on the site, that I made it exactly like our other two, which had been operating for years, and always had a 25% balance on booking, with the balance 8 weeks before arrival. I called VRBO and they couldn’t explain it. But unfortunately I have discovered things like this before over the years, when setting mysteriously get changed on the site, and I don’t know why. I just know that I didn’t set them up this way. For example, I just got an inquiry tonight for six nights at Christmas time, and that’s never supposed to happen, as our minimum for that time of year is seven nights, but when I went and checked, sure enough the minimum nights was set to 5 for 3 out of the 14 nights of the holiday season, for that one property only. The other two were correct. How do things like that happen? I don’t know. I only know they do. (cont.) But no matter how it happened, it is pretty easy to understand that a property that is listed as requiring full payment up front, no matter how far ahead the booking is made, is not going to get many bookings!
So for that year (2024) we got very few bookings at all through VRBO. Practically none! This being the case, there weren’t very many guests who could leave a review.
Remember, most of our bookings come from other sources because we’ve been at this a long time, and we’re very good (at least I like to think so) at what we do. So most of our guests at this property couldn’t leave a review on VRBO.
Guest Surveys unfortunately Prevent Reviews
There is another reason, and that is because when our guests leave, we send them a detailed guest exit survey, where we ask them lots of questions about their stay. We really want to know what they liked the most, what the liked the least, and also ask them about things they might not even think about if just asked “How were things? Rate 1 out of 5 stars.” As part of completing our guest survey, guests are asked to write a review about their stay, which we post other places. We also ask them to post them here, but many don’t. They feel that they’ve had a chance to express their thoughts and are not worried or concerned about posting them again here, many think we can do it for them (we can’t) and a few just don’t care.
Finally, some of it comes down to bad luck, which will happen sometimes. For example, we had one guest who was an elderly gentleman and not physically very strong. When he booked, we spoke on the phone, and he talked my ear off telling me what a great guest he would be, and all about his business that he hadn’t yet retired from, and on and on. I thought “Great, this guest is very expressive! He’ll leave us a great review!” As one of our first guests, he even got a discount from VRBO to do it!
And even though he told me that he loved the property and had a great time, and he was instead very disappointed and angry about his stay! Why? Because we hadn’t yet installed a hot tub cover lifter on the hot tub, like he was used to at his own home. The previous owners of this property had a hot tub for ten years, with no lifter for the heavy cover, ever, but that was enough for this particular guest to rate his stay very badly on his exit review. I asked him about many other aspects of the property; the layout, the yard, the privacy, the new furniture and amenities, five TVs, new decorating… everything! But nothing else mattered. His stay was awful because we didn’t have a hot tub cover lifter. And boy he sure let me know it! I was glad when he didn’t post a copy of his comments on VRBO! (Since then, I had a new cover custom made, and ordered and installed one of the best cover lifters in the business, which I’m very proud of! I told the guest that I had already ordered the cover lifter, but wouldn’t install it until the new custom cover was ready, but he didn’t care. You would have thought we had rats running all over the place! So stuff like that happens. That’s just life as a busy vacation rental owner/manager.)
People are less inclined when you’re an old pro with an established reputation
And… when you’ve been in business as long as we have, and have built up a reputation over a long time as we have, people don’t think you need the help of a positive review, and are less inclined to provide them. When we started out, every booking got a 5-Star review, and every review got posted. People look at our record now and don’t think we need the help.
So there’s a long answer for you, but you caught me on the computer just now, and I guess my fingers were in a mood for typing. I’ve been thinking about the very issue you asked about myself for a while, so the answer has been floating in my head and just ready to come out.
We have over 100 reviews between our other two properties on VRBO, and I hope guests do find and read them when trying to understand what kind of owners we are and what our properties are like, but VRBO doesn’t make it easy to find additional properties belonging to the same owner. Guests really have to sleuth them out.
And then, as so often happens with life in this universe, the stars aligned, and within one week, we had a guest stay at Happy Oak Villa, booked at the last minute through VRBO, depart and leave a 5-Star review!
Thankfully, no matter where our reviews are posted, and they are posted in a lot of different places by guests (TripAdvisor, VRBO, AirBnB [Nah… not there!], OrlandoVillas, Google, still other places, and our own Guest Exit Surveys of course) we curate all of them, and post them here on our website, in a consistent format, so we’ll always have a copy of them.
And you can see them here by clicking on any of the following links:
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