You just created your accommodation on Booking.com and want to give it a jump start? Listings with good reviews are displayed on top of the search results, so what can you do if you don’t have any reviews yet because your listing is brand new?
We have good news: Booking.com has developed a system that imports reviews scores from other trusted sources to your new vacation rental listings – even if you haven’t received a reservation on Booking.com yet. We’ll explain how it works:
Here’s how Booking.com creates external reviews scores
The online portal introduced this option to help vacation rental owners and hosts who are new to the platform. By importing reviews from other platforms, your listing will receive a rating on Booking.com. This makes it more interesting for potential guests.
As you know, positive reviews increase the visibility of your listing. But how exactly does it work with external reviews? First of all, you need to publish your listing on the Booking.com extranet. Then, if you’ve received fewer than three separate reviews on your listing from travelers who booked through Booking.com, you qualify for the external reviews.
Booking.com says the following about this:
We only import external review scores from travel websites that we trust, and which have similar standards to our platform. We review all external review scores every few weeks to make sure they’re accurate and up-to-date.
Booking will then import the external reviews and convert them into ratings according to its own criteria.
This is how the rating of external comments are displayed
The result of the external reviews will then be displayed in the Booking search results or on your listing page in a box with a white background (as opposed to the box with a blue background for the reviews on Booking.com). You can also see the number of comments that were taken into account for the calculation. As soon as you have received three “real” Booking.com reviews, the rating of the external reviews will be replaced by the rating of the Booking customers and you will receive the coveted blue box.
How to qualify for external review results
- your listing is online on Booking.com
- your listing has less than 3 separate customer reviews from Booking.com so far
- your vacation rental is advertised on other booking platforms and already has reviews there
Learn more about it here.
Smoobu’s ultimate guide to getting started on Booking.com
Smoobu has created the ultimate Booking.com guide for owners. What makes a good listing? How does the commission system work? What can you setup in the extranet? In our Booking.com guide for vacation rental hosts you will learn everything you need to know!
