Sometimes, you expect a review for your company to show up and it has not. SafariBookings has a team and algorithm in place to inspect all of the reviews that operators receive. If the review is not up to standard it will be removed from the platform. This article discusses the reasons why this may happen.
The review criteria
The analysis team (with the help of our technology) will screen reviews against a set of criteria. Each review must meet these:
- The review must contain family-friendly content only
- The review should be posted to the correct operator
- The review must comply with all other guidelines (detailed below)
Our fully automated review-check software is designed to filter out suspicious or non-authentic reviews. If a review is flagged by our system, our review team will manually check the review again. This check could also affect reviews that have been approved in the past.
Reasons why your review was declined or taken offline
The most common reasons for decline or removal are:
- The review is not genuine or authentic
- The review is written in your office or country
- The review is written by one of your employees
- The review is written using a virtual private network (VPN) service
- The review is written by another operator
- The reviewer has written more than one review for your company
- The review is a duplicate review for multiple companies (sometimes of the same owner)
- The review is written in a foreign language (not English)
- The review contains inappropriate language
- The review contains privacy-sensitive information (e.g. contact details, photos)
Some operators try to jump the queue and buy reviews to artificially boost their online reputation. As we take review legitimacy very seriously, approving your review may take some time. Therefore, if your review is not approved right away after it is submitted, don't worry. It can take up to a week for legitimate reviews to appear on your company profile.
The practice of buying or faking reviews is unacceptable because it violates SafariBookings guidelines. Getting caught with fraudulent reviews can ultimately result in the permanent suspension of your SafariBookings listing. Read more about our Fraudulent Review Policy
Gather authentic reviews
The path to review success is patience and accumulating authentic reviews. Try to be proactive; start asking for reviews, even those that might at first be negative. Doing so provides the insights that you need to improve the experience you offer to your future customers.
This will pay off in the long term with more genuine, legitimate, and positive reviews. People understand you can’t please everyone and they don’t mind a negative review if the majority of reviews listed are positive. Having a couple of negative reviews can even add credibility to your overall rating because your listing looks more realistic.
We also advise you to ask your clients to write a review when they are back in their home country. You can use our ‘review invite’ service to schedule this process automatically. As soon as the client confirms their booking, you should know the date the client returns home. You can then schedule the ‘review invite’ email to be sent one or two days after their return.
To do this, log into your operator profile and click on the ‘Reviews’ tab. Then click on the ‘Invite Service‘ tab (or click here). Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the button ‘Add Invite(s)’. You will then see the following pop-up.
- If you’d like to send the invite immediately, select the option ‘Send now’.
- You can schedule the invite for a later date. Select the date from the dropdown. Please note that invites are sent at UTC/GMT 2pm or 3pm.
- Enter the client’s name and email address in this section. You can do this for several clients at the same time.
- If there aren’t enough spaces, you can simply add more fields by clicking the ‘+Add client’ button.
- To finalize everything, click on the button ‘Schedule invite(s)’.
Pictured below is a sample of the review invite email sent to the client:
What if an authentic review was declined?
Authentic reviews getting declined is an extremely rare occurrence. It’s not possible to communicate with us about the reason why your review is declined and declined reviews will not be published again.
Instead, you can email the client to ask them to write another review. Explain to the client that their previous review has been declined by SafariBookings and that you will send them another request, which they’ll receive from the SafariBookings ‘review invite’ service.
The team and software that audits the reviews cannot do exhaustive fact-checking. False positives do happen, but as mentioned, they are extremely rare. We sincerely apologize if an authentic review is taken offline and we appreciate your understanding on this matter.