Offering customer reviews of vacation rentals

I recently found this post at the Vacation Rental Owner Forum blog about Homeaway's new review feature. The post asserts that customer reviews are subjective and can be unfair, but still recommends owners think about providing this feature on their Homeaway listings because customers can search via reviewed properties. The article says,

According to Homeaway, the advantages of renter reviews include:
1. Reviews increase trust and credibility: Your guests read reviews from past guests for reassurance.
2. Travelers rely on them: 77% of online shoppers use reviews when making purchase decisions (Jupiter Research).
3. Travelers can sort by reviews: This gives homes with more reviews increased visibility with travelers looking for their next vacation home.
4. Reviews let guests promote your vacation home: More than 95% of reviews are positive.

It doesn't take any formal research to realize customer reviews are one of the popular features on the web right now. Any major shopping Web site includes them, and vacation rentals are just hopping on the already moving bandwagon.

At Carolina Mornings, we chose to include reviews for our properties due to this trend but more importantly because we wanted to demonstrate our commitment to credibility and accountability for our rentals and our services.

We use FlipKey.com. Unfortunately this means we can't show the reviews right on our Web listings (yet), but we really love our partnership with FlipKey. We also have a large icon on our homepage that points visitors to our FlipKey reviews site and we try to tell our prospective customers to check out the reviews before they book.

We love reading our reviews which, in keeping with our high company standards, are positive overall. We consistently have an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of 5. And we appreciate the feedback from guests when things don't go perfectly, so that we know what we need to fix. Furthermore, FlipKey allows us to respond to reviews so that we can thank our guests and address any problems they indicated.

We welcome you to read our reviews. We're glad to have them! As a vacation rental company, we hope Homeaway's reviews will help improve credibility in the industry. However, we still believe that renting with a small local business of realtors representing properties is more secure and provides more customer service bonuses, such as helping you pick the right property for your needs. And you'll support the local economy of the area you're visiting! As I always say, that's the way to get more 'bang for your buck'!