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, and doubles the 5-star ratings.

Definitions

In-stay survey. A short rating prompt sent to a guest during their stay or just before checkout to surface complaints privately before they become public reviews.

Day 1 check-in message. An automated message sent to a guest within the first 24 hours of arrival, "how is everything?" prompt that opens feedback from them.

AI Agents. Reads guest messages, figures out what they actually want, and answers them or creates a task for your team. For reviews, that means catching complaints in the moment and routing them before they end up online.

What guests complain about.

In Akia's analysis of one- and two-star reviews, room condition was the top complaint category at 21.8% — six times larger than the next category. Service, location, noise, and price each accounted for under 4% of complaints.

Figure 1: Across one- and two-star reviews, room condition accounts for 21.8% of complaints — six times more than the next category (service, ~4%). Location, noise, price, and check-in process each fall under 4%.

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

Inside the room complaints.

The 1,229 room-condition complaints fall into six sub-categories: cleanliness, plumbing and water, HVAC and temperature, broken fixtures, smells, and electrical issues.

Figure 2: The 1,229 room-condition complaints break into six sub-categories: cleanliness, plumbing, HVAC, broken fixtures, smells, and electrical. Cleanliness and plumbing dominate, together accounting for the majority of complaints.

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, leading to more 5-star ratings. Identify the guests who were happy with their stay and make it easier for them to leave a review by automatically linking your online review site.

Quick changes to reduce 1 star reviews.

The three operational changes that reduce 1-star reviews fastest are: training your AI to recognize complaint , auto-creating tasks from flagged messages, and tracking which complaints repeat across units.

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.