Key findings

  • 21.8% of 1- and 2-star reviews are about the room itself. Room condition is 6× the size of any other complaint category.

  • Across thousands of Survey responses, 74% of 1-star raters provided additional feedback. Only 0.04% of 5-star raters did.

  • Properties that send a Day 1 "checking in" message see Survey response rates 2.4× higher than properties that skip it. It surfaces the unhappy guests who would have otherwise stayed silent until the public review.

What guests complain about.

When unhappy guests provide feedback, here's what their issues are around:

Room condition is 6× the size of any other complaint category. Everything else is a rounding error in comparison.

Inside the room complaints.

We broke the 1,229 room-condition comments into six sub-categories:

Most room complaints are about a small number of repeatable, fixable things.

Happy guests rate. Unhappy guests explain.

Guests who had a great stay tap five stars and leave. Guests who had a bad stay want to be heard, and if you don't give them a place, the review site becomes that place.

A short survey sent before checkout asking the guest to rate their stay from 1 to 5 with an optional comment gives you the opportunity to address potential concerns before they are posted online. Across thousands of responses, 74% of 1-star raters added a comment. Only 0.04% of 5-star raters did.

Collecting ratings allow properties to fix issues before it gets posted online.

Start the conversation earlier.

We pulled reservations across multiple months and found that Survey response rates doubled whenever a "Just checking in" message was sent within a few days of arriving.

Quick changes to reduce 1 star reviews.

Train your AI to recognize complaint keywords. The vocabulary of a room-condition complaint is clear: broken, dirty, no hot water, smells, shower, leaking, won't work, can you send someone. An AI agent that scans inbound messages for these patterns can flag the conversation to housekeeping (or other departments).

Auto-create tasks from messages. Every flagged complaint provides a documented task in your system, timestamped, of the guest, with the room number.

Identify repeated issues: Single stays get fixed. The bigger payoff is what shows up after a few hundred Tasks — which complaints repeat, which units keep hitting the same problem, where to spend the next maintenance dollar. Akia surfaces that pattern across the portfolio.