Fifty reviews, one duty manager, and a one-star unanswered

The question this file answersWho answers our reviews when the duty manager is on the floor — and how long does the one-star wait?

Fits: hotel groups and larger independents receiving 5–50+ reviews a day across OTAs and review sites, with or without a reputation tool such as TrustYou, ReviewPro or Medallia, where every reply still passes through one manager.

Not for: a single property with a few reviews a week — the owner's own voice is the asset there — or teams whose problem is service recovery rather than the drafting and sorting around it.

Typical day

What the desk looks like today

Typical, from the hospitality playbook — not a client's day. A hotel group collects 5–50+ reviews a day across the OTAs and review platforms. Someone monitors the platforms, reads each one, sorts praise from complaint, drafts a reply, waits for the manager's approval, posts it — and once a month tries to tell management what the reviews were saying. Weekends and peak season break the routine first: reviews arrive fastest when the manager is on the floor, and the four-star 'lovely stay' and the one-star about a cold room sit in the same unanswered queue until Tuesday.

What changes

What Monday looks like after

By the 09:00 handover, the overnight reviews are already sorted. The duty manager opens a short approval list — drafts for the routine praise, each naming what the guest praised — and approves them in the time it used to take to write one. Two reviews are marked serious: those carry the booking and the room number, and they are the manager's real work that morning. Housekeeping sees the 'hair in the shower' review the same day, not in a monthly deck. You can see, per property and platform, what was answered, how fast, and what recurred. The manager still writes every reply that matters; the thank-you notes stop waiting.

Typical, not a measured client result. Every figure here comes from the playbook source named below.

Drafted

review replies drafted from the PMS record — TrustYou (2023) measures response rate, not hours

Before: every review waits for a manager, and the complaint is buried. After: TrustYou (2023) reports response rates lifted 60–80% with assisted drafting — recovery and compensation stay human.

How this file is built

TrustYou 'Hotel Reputation' (2023) reports AI-assisted response lifting response rates by 60–80% while quality scores held; TrustYou's number, not ours. Playbook range for review operations 40–60%. ReviewPro's rating-point improvement is not claimed here as an Aperanda result.

What we install

What we put in front of the systems you already run

TrustYou, ReviewPro or Medallia keep doing the monitoring; the PMS keeps the booking. What we add is a sorting and drafting step:

new reviews are pulled from each platform and classified by sentiment and topic — housekeeping, breakfast, noise, staff
routine positive and neutral reviews get a draft reply in your house voice, naming what the guest mentioned, queued for the duty manager's approval
reviews describing an operational fault are tagged so the department sees them, not only marketing
serious complaints are flagged for a person at once, booking attached, and no draft is posted without them
a monthly trend note is compiled from the same tags.

We begin with the routine praise — the bulk of what waits.

What stays human — and what this will not do

Response to a serious complaint. Service recovery and any compensation. Brand voice on a bad night. The operational change the review was asking for.

What can go wrong — and what we do about it

A draft in the wrong tone is worse than no reply — so the house voice is written down and tested in the audit before any draft is queued, and serious complaints never receive a drafted answer. Sentiment reading fails on sarcasm and mixed reviews; those land in the review list with a flag, not in the routine pile. Some platforms permit no posting through an API, so the step there is a draft to paste. The 40–60% range is about drafting and sorting effort; TrustYou's response-rate figure is not a rating or revenue promise.

How long it takes, and what we need from you

Audit, about two weeks (€1.5–3K): we read three months of reviews and replies, count them by platform, and check what your reputation tool and the OTA extranets allow — posting through an API, or a draft to paste. Pilot, 2–3 weeks (€10–20K) — the hospitality playbook rates this low complexity: one property, routine reviews only, every draft approved by a person. Production: more properties, tagging to departments, the trend note. From you: platform logins, replies you were proud of, the line never to cross.

The path: free 60-second estimate → free 20-minute review → paid audit of this one process (€1.5–3K, typically two weeks) → pilot with your people in the loop (€10–20K, weeks, not quarters). No transformation programme. Prices are public, on the services page →

This is about you if…

Do reviews arrive on several platforms with no single place they are read?
Does one manager draft or approve every reply, including the routine praise?
Do you run a reputation tool, or would posting still be by hand?

What does this mean in euros?

That depends on your volumes and wage costs — this page will not invent the number. The free 60-second estimate runs that calculation from your answers, with every multiplier sourced.

Get your free savings estimate 60 seconds · no sales call Or write first → Map an ops process like this one — free, 60 seconds →

Not a named Aperanda client. Process file · Ops.

Deep-dive process file. Volumes, weeks and sources come from the industry playbook; nothing here is a named client.

All process files