Six things your hotel says in someone else's voice before the guest even arrives

In 2025, just over half of hotel bookings in Europe were made through the hotel's own channels: its website, phone, email, or at the front desk. According to the latest Hotrec distribution study, published in September, direct sales accounted for 51.3%, while online travel agencies like Booking or Expedia represented 29.9%.

This is good news for hotels, but there is fine print. Before booking via the website, that guest has almost always visited Booking, read reviews, checked if the hotel bothers to respond to them, and snooped around two or three sites for information about the accommodation. On all those sites, the hotel writes very little, and what little it does write often sounds just like any other hotel.

This week, to see to what extent this still holds true today, we reviewed 25 independent three- and four-star hotels on Booking across Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Salamanca, Granada, Toledo, Cordoba, and Santiago de Compostela. For each one, we read the ten reviews that Booking shows first (nearly all from September and October) along with their responses. Based on that and what we have observed working with hotels, we can share six key findings.

1. The Booking profile is set up once and left as is

On Booking, all listings follow the same format. The hotel controls very little… the order of the photos, the description copy, and the name assigned to each room. Consequently, each of these elements matters even more than what appears on the hotel's own website.

A “Standard Double Room” tells a guest nothing. “Double with Balcony Overlooking the Square” already says something about the hotel. The same goes for the primary photo. Whether it shows the façade at night, a bed, or the view from the terrace, the guest gets a completely different impression of the place before reading a single line.

It is easy for a listing to be filled in when the hotel first signs up and then only touched to update rates or swap a photo. Meanwhile, the website evolves, the restaurant updates its menu, rooms are sometimes renamed, yet the profile continues to describe the hotel from years ago.

2. Almost half of reviews remain unanswered

Booking accounts for 60% of hotel reviews in Europe, according to the Shiji ReviewPro benchmark based on 2025 data. It is the primary place where travellers read what others have said about the hotel and how the hotel has replied.

The same report notes that European three-star hotels responded to 49.6% of their reviews, nearly twenty points lower than four-star hotels. Our sample showed a similar pattern: out of 250 reviews, 110 had a reply—just 44%.

What the average does not show is how unevenly this is distributed. Eight of the 25 hotels had responded to nine or ten of their last ten reviews. Eleven had not responded to a single one. In Toledo, all seven hotels we looked at responded; in Santiago, none of the four did. One of the non-responding hotels in Madrid has over 8,000 reviews on Booking and a score of 8.4.

3. When replies are posted, they sound like someone else

Of the 14 hotels that replied, 12 used formal address, eight of them starting with “Dear Sir/Madam” or “Dear Guest”. Only two took an informal tone. I do not believe one approach is inherently better than the other, but I seriously question whether the hotel expresses itself in that same manner on its website, on Instagram, or at the front desk. If the hotel comes across as approachable online yet reads like a legal document in its reviews, the guest is effectively encountering two different establishments.

The clearest example came from two hotels in Seville that answered almost everything—nine out of ten reviews each. The replies simply swapped the guest’s name and cycled through a handful of canned phrases. One of them, “It was a pleasure to serve you and we hope to do so again soon”, appeared word-for-word across both hotels. Responding this way is clearly better than not responding at all, but anyone reading three consecutive replies will realise that nobody wrote them with that specific guest in mind.

At the other extreme, a hotel in Granada replied: “Dear Sandra, What a joy that you chose us for your visit to Granada!”. It uses informal phrasing, names the hotel’s location, and feels like a genuine, distinctive property—even if, in other replies, the same hotel slips back into “Dear guest”...

The tools for replying already exist. Shiji ReviewPro, the same company from the earlier report, has featured an AI-powered response generator since late 2024 that allows you to choose the tone (formal, friendly, empathetic), length, and sign-off. Replying to ten reviews no longer takes an entire afternoon. What the tool cannot decide is how your hotel speaks: if you choose “formal”, you will sound identical to the twelve hotels in our sample using standard corporate replies. With chatbots, the mistake is identical to agents: if nobody determines the brand’s voice in advance, you simply end up sounding like everyone else.

4. The booking engine does not match the website

Many hotel websites are carefully crafted right up until the guest clicks “Book”. At that point, the third-party booking engine opens with a different font, different colours, and different copy. The very step where the guest enters their card details is often the one that least resembles the hotel itself.

The engines we work with allow you to adjust colours, logos, and copy, but what is usually missing is someone taking the care to avoid leaving the default placeholder text. The rate names, terms and conditions, the error message when there is no availability… these are just a few lines of copy, and they are read by the very person on the verge of paying.

5. Between booking and arrival, the hotel goes silent

If a booking comes through Booking.com, the confirmation email comes from Booking—and that makes sense, as they acquired the customer. If it comes via the website, the booking engine sends its own email, which we all know rarely contains much beyond the reference number, dates, and cancellation policy.

After that, there is usually complete radio silence until the guest arrives at the desk. That gap can last for weeks, and it represents the only period when the hotel already has the guest’s contact details before ever seeing them in person.

This gap can easily be filled with small gestures. An email a few days after booking explaining who is behind the hotel and what is nearby (here you can take the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell if simply welcoming your guest does not feel like enough). A phone call prior to arrival asking what time they expect to arrive or if they are visiting for a special occasion. A local welcome touch upon check-in. None of these three require new software—just someone to decide what to say, in what tone of voice, and who will do it each day. And to ensure email number four hundred sounds just as authentic as the very first.

6. Every platform rates the hotel differently, yet often nobody compares them

At one of the hotels we worked with, the rating ranged from a 3.3 out of 5 on Tripadvisor to a 9.8 out of 10 on another platform—with the exact same team and the exact same building. Every platform attracts its own audience and uses its own scoring scale, so discrepancies are normal. What is not normal is for nobody at the hotel to even realise the gap exists.

Guests, however, do notice. They search for the hotel on Google, see one score, go to Booking and see another, and open Tripadvisor to find a third. When the gap is substantial, they check the lowest-scoring reviews to understand what went wrong. That brings us straight back to points 2 and 3: whether there is a response, and whether it makes the guest feel like just another transaction.

An afternoon audit

All of this can be reviewed in an afternoon, without any specialised tools or outside help:

• Open your Booking listing as if you had never heard of the hotel. Look at the primary photo, the room names, and the first three lines of the description.

• Read your last ten reviews on Booking and count how many have received a reply.

• Read three replies in a row. If they sound like they were generated from the same template, your guests will notice too.

• Compare a review reply with a paragraph from your website. Does it sound like the same hotel speaking?

• Go through the booking flow on your website right up to the final payment step and see whether it stops feeling like your hotel at any point.

• Have a real booking confirmation email forwarded to you and read it from a guest’s perspective.

• Note down your scores across Google, Booking, and Tripadvisor side by side on a single sheet of paper.

And take note of the exact moment you stop being treated like a guest and start being treated like a booking reference.