How to Remove the Reviews From Expedia

Customer feedback is highly essential in ascertaining the overall reputation and goodwill of a business. Hence reviews play a pivotal role in helping the business prosper. Whether you are a hotel or any other business, your reputation over the OTA is extremely important for your customer.

One of the fastest growing online travel portals, Expedia is an American travel booking website that is at the forefront of virtual booking agencies. It offers travelers a plethora of options for hotels, activities, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages, etc. for every budget along with a host of Expedia subsidiaries.

Reviews play a crucial role in helping to determine the overall reputation and character of business. A review from one user is likely to influence other customers’ decisions to a great extent.

For instance, if someone claims that the property is immaculate and the staff service is excellent, you are likely to be drawn positively towards that comment.

On the other hand, if someone complains about the property being grungy and staff incompetent, this will generally be a massive turn off for others. After all, 94% of customers avoided a business based on negative reviews in 2018.

Everything that a customer writes about a hotel or any other service, to that matter of fact, may not be accurate. It must be kept in mind that a review is more of a subjective opinion after (or not) a first-hand experience which may or may not be the same for everyone.

In a nutshell, all reviews are not reliable. Again, a deliberately crafted negative review bringing ill reputation to a business counts as fraudulent behavior.

Hence every owner would be concerned about keeping away from such reviews which might have a stronghold over influencing the customers’ decisions in a negative manner.

Thus when it comes to removing the reviews from Expedia, this platform has a different policy and rules of its own which the owners have to abide by.

So How Does the Review Removal Process Work?

Firstly, the Expedia Group doesn’t really verify the accuracy of guest reviews. For instance, even if you attempted to book a property and did not really stay there or left before your scheduled departure, you are still in a position to post your review. In other words, Expedia does not really remove a review on the basis of false statement claims, negative content, defamatory claims, blackmail claims or the claims of the guest being a “no show.”

But Expedia has its own set of guidelines which permits the review removal under certain limited scenarios or circumstances:

1) If the review has the full name of a property staff member.

2) If the reviewer’s photo contains any inappropriate stuff such as nudity or pornographic elements.

3) If the review has a trace of violence to a child or child pornography.4) If the review contains the evidence of serious injury or death of any guest.

[Note: Review Removal is at the sole discretion of Expedia Group]

Change of Property Ownership or Management/ Major Renovations

You can definitely request Expedia for review removal in case of the change of management or ownership. Even in the cases of major renovations, review removal requests could be placed.

For this, one will be required to submit an intake form which should have all the necessary details and a legitimate reason for the request.

What If Your Review Does Not Fall into Any of These Categories?

As noted above, the removal of review is at the sole discretion of the Expedia Group. However, there’s still a possibility to reach out and alter things even if your review does not fall under any of these categories. In such cases, it is always advisable to submit a management response through the Guest Reviews tool to address any issues raised.

The benefit of this is that it allows the manager or owner to engage directly with the guests and resolve the disputes by highlighting the positive aspects or property improvements. Again, it allows you to tell your side of the story and helps clear the negative air.

Again, if your reason is not in line with the dispute policy, you can always submit a review dispute form.

How Can You Reach Out/ Is there a Plan B?

There’s always a possibility to reach out to the Expedia Group explaining to them your reason behind the request for review removal.

You can reach out to the lodging services team at Expedia, or your local Market Manager and explain the situation and request to see if the review can be removed in those unique circumstances. You can get the market manager contact after you log in to your Expedia Partner Central.

Removing the reviews might be a little tacky. But it surely wouldn’t be a problem with the right aid and guidance. In fact, the very first tenet to get this thing under control is by trying your best to prevent the negative reviews from cropping up in the first place.

Here a few tips for the same:

• Manage your Reviews on an everyday basis. A Review Management Solution can come in handy to help you respond to the reviews accurately on go by managing them all on a single dashboard.

• Give timely responses to your reviews.

• Make your offline actions better by seeking to improve. Overhaul or renovation can influence your reputation and ranking to a great extent.

• Formulate a schedule to check your reviews

• Take your time to analyze or distinguish a fishy review from the real one.

Lastly, get a Reputation Management Solution to save yourself from the peril of fake or negative reviews as it allows you to check and respond to your reviews timely by bringing them all in one place.

With GuestTouch, you can engage with your guests across all the major sites with professional responses which influence your bookings.

Any questions? Feel free to reach out