A boat rental in the north of Corfu gets this review: “Engine cut out twice off Kalami and we lost an hour waiting for help. €180 for that?” The reply most businesses post is some version of “Dear guest, thank you for your feedback. We are sorry your experience did not meet your expectations and hope to welcome you again.” It is polite and it answers nothing. Anyone reading it learns only that the engine story is probably true.
This guide gives a method for writing a better one, followed by negative review response examples for the five situations a local business meets most often. The method follows the guidance that Google and Tripadvisor publish for owners. Every review and reply below was written for this article. None of them is a real review.
Before you write anything
Wait until the next morning. Then find out what happened. Ask whoever was on shift, check the booking, look at the day’s notes. You cannot write a specific reply about an evening you only know from the review.
Once you know the facts, decide which case you are in, because the reply is different for each. Either the mistake was yours, or the guest is partly right, or the cause was outside your control, or the review says too little to tell, or you cannot find this person among your customers at all.
The five parts of a reply
1. Name the problem in their words
Google’s advice is to acknowledge the reviewer’s specific feedback. In practice that means repeating the complaint plainly: the engine failed twice, you waited 50 minutes, the room was not ready at three. “Your experience did not meet your expectations” could sit under any review of any business, and readers recognise it. This first sentence is where they decide whether a person wrote the reply.
2. Apologise for what was yours
Google puts it as two instructions that belong together: apologise when appropriate, and acknowledge mistakes without taking responsibility for things outside your control. So apologise for the wait, the missing phone call, the dirty glass. Do not apologise for the weather, the ferry timetable or the power company. A precise apology reads as honest. One that covers everything reads as a formula.
3. Explain in one sentence
Say what caused it, once, without decoration. “We were two people short in the kitchen” is an explanation. Three sentences about how hard August is for everyone is an excuse, and the reader hears the difference. If there is no cause worth mentioning, skip this part.
4. Say what you changed
This is the sentence written for the next customer. They want to know whether the same thing will happen to them. Name the change: the filter was replaced, guests now get a message, the waiter now confirms the price before the fish is cooked. If you have changed nothing yet, say what you will do and when. Never write a change you have not made.
5. Offer a private way to continue, and sign it
For anything complicated, Google suggests politely asking the reviewer to contact you by phone or email so it can be resolved in private. Refunds and details belong there and not in public. Then sign with your first name. Google recommends a personal sign-off, and on Google the reply is posted under the business name, so the signature is the only sign that a person wrote it.
All five parts fit in five or six sentences. Google’s own tip is to keep replies short, because people stop reading long ones before they reach the point.
Negative review response examples for five situations
The mistake was yours
The review: “Engine cut out twice off Kalami and we lost an hour waiting for help. €180 for that?”
“Hello Daniel. The engine failed twice on Tuesday and you lost an hour of a day you had paid for. That is on us. The boat had been serviced the week before, but we had not replaced the fuel filter, and that was the cause. It has now been replaced on all four boats. Please call me on the number in your booking confirmation. I want to put this right. Yannis”
All five parts are there. The settlement itself is left for the phone call.
The guest is partly right
The review: “€64 for one fish. Tourist trap.”
“Hello Anna. I understand the surprise when the bill came. Fresh fish is priced by the kilo and the price is on the menu, but your waiter should have weighed the fish and told you the cost before it went on the grill. We do that at every table and it did not happen at yours. I have gone over it with the team. Maria”
The reply corrects the “tourist trap” claim with one fact and then gives the guest the part she is right about. It does not argue about the word.
The cause was outside your control
The review: “No air conditioning for a whole afternoon in July. Unacceptable at this price.”
“Hello Tom. The power went off across the village that Wednesday afternoon and came back in the evening. We could not prevent that. We could have been quicker to tell you what was happening, and I am sorry you had to call us to find out. We now message guests as soon as an outage starts, and we have put a fan in every bedroom for those hours. Katerina”
Google’s example for this case is an event cancelled for bad weather: explain what you can and cannot do. Here the outage is explained and the slow communication is owned.
The review says almost nothing
The review: “Terrible. Avoid.”
“Hello Chris. I am sorry you left unhappy. Your review does not say what went wrong and I would like to know, because I cannot fix what I cannot see. Please write to me at the email address on our profile, or ask for me if you pass by again. Nikos”
There is nothing to explain and nothing to change yet, so the reply has only three of the five parts. It does not guess at the problem.
You cannot find this customer
The review: “Rude staff, dirty rooms.” The name matches no booking and you have no idea who it is.
“Hello. We have looked through this summer’s bookings and cannot match this review to a stay with us. If you were our guest, please contact me directly with your dates and I will look into it the same day. Eleni”
The reply states a fact and leaves the door open. It does not call the reviewer a liar or a competitor. If you believe the review breaks the platform’s rules, report it through the platform as well. On Google, only reviews that violate its policies are eligible for removal, and its reporting page says not to report a review because you disagree with it.
What works on each platform
The five parts stay the same everywhere. The rules around them do not. A reply that is fine on Google can be rejected on Tripadvisor or never published on Booking.com.
| Platform | What to remember |
|---|---|
| Use the reviewer’s name and sign with yours. No deals or promotions. | |
| Tripadvisor | No names, no offers, no accusations of fraud. One language per response. |
| Booking.com | Reply in the review’s language or in English. Only reviews with a title or comments can be answered. |
| Airbnb | Your response appears publicly below the review. Report reviews that break Airbnb’s policies. |
The examples above are written for Google. Its advice is to address the reviewer by name and to sign off personally, and the reply is posted under the business name. According to Google’s help page on managing reviews, each reply is checked against its content policies before it appears, usually within 10 minutes and sometimes up to 30 days. The reviewer is notified and can still change the review afterwards. You can edit or delete your reply later. Keep deals and promotions out of it, and never offer anything in exchange for changing or removing a review, which Google prohibits.
Tripadvisor
Tripadvisor’s guidelines for management responses go the other way on names. They prohibit personal information that could identify an individual, and they list names. They also rule out speculation about who the reviewer is, accusations of review fraud, quoting correspondence from the guest, commercial or promotional content, and offers of gifts, services or money. Responses written in two languages are rejected, and so are machine translations that cannot be understood. The response is posted directly under the review, where anyone can read it.
So for Tripadvisor, take the name out and start with the event: “Thank you for telling us about Tuesday. The engine failed twice and you lost an hour of your day.” The rest of the method holds. Choose one language. If the review is in German and your German is not good enough to write it properly, plain English is the safer choice.
Booking.com
Booking.com has the strictest rule on language. Its partner help page on responding to guest reviews says you can reply in the language of the review or in English, and that responses in other languages will not be published. A reply in Greek to a review written in German will not appear. You can only respond to reviews that have a title or comments, so a bare score cannot be answered.
You reply in the extranet under Guest reviews, or in the Pulse app, and Booking.com’s team reviews each response before it is published. To edit or remove a response later you need the extranet. Its tips for owners match the method above: keep the response short, make sure what you write is true and accurate, be specific, acknowledge the bad experience and say what you are doing to improve.
Airbnb
On Airbnb you can post a public response to a review you received. Airbnb’s help centre says it appears directly below the review and is visible to the rest of the Airbnb community. If the review is against Airbnb’s policies you can report it. The page gives no writing tips beyond that, so use the five parts as they are.
If the same guest reviewed you in two places, write the reply once with the five parts, then adjust the greeting and the language for each platform. Do not paste the Google version everywhere.
Read it once more before you post
Read the reply as someone who has never heard of your business and is choosing between you and the place next door. Check that it names the problem, that it contains nothing private about the guest, and that you could not paste it under a different review. That last check matters: in BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a panel of 1,002 adults in the United States, half of consumers said a templated or generic response makes them unlikely to choose a business. In the same survey 81% expected a reply to their review within a week, so do not let the draft sit for long.
A reply deals with one review. What a new customer sees first is the rating and how recent the reviews are, which we covered in The 4.2 Star Trap.
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