Begging For Reviews...Why?
Asking for a review is not inherently unethical, but the method determines its propriety.
In the hospitality industry, guest reviews are more than just feedback—they are a powerful tool for improving service quality, building reputation, and boosting online visibility. But pressuring staff to push for only positive reviews paints a dubious picture.
Recently I went to a city hotel in the heart of Colombo’s business district for lunch with my family. Things went well, and at the end of the meal, our server inquired about our experience. When we confirmed that it had been good, he requested us to write a review on TripAdvisor, and even to include the staff names. Sensing that he was required to ask satisfied guests to do it, I immediately did it as he was merely doing his job.
But it got me wondering, is it proper, or even ethical for hotels, restaurants, cafes, etc., to ask their staff to request only satisfied patrons to write positive reviews? Furthermore, doesn’t selectively filtering out unhappy customers or instructing staff to only prompt guests, who seem visibly pleased, create an artificially inflated representation of the business performance? It certainly does. This practice frequently compromises honest guest feedback, creates awkward customer interactions and violates the terms of major review platforms.
Review manipulation: A questionable practice?
This wasn’t the first time that I had heard of such a thing. A couple of months back, my wife and her friends visited one of those shiny new cafes in Colombo 7 – the type that seem to pop up, stay around for a bit and then disappear, only to be replaced by something else along similar lines. And when she returned home, she was a bit bemused by the fact that the server had pressed their group to write a positive review. In this case, the server had confidentially disclosed that getting a certain number of positive reviews from customers of the café was one of her KPIs!
I don’t know. Perhaps I’m an old-fashioned fuddy duddy Millennial, but this is probably one of the lowest things a property owner or management team can do to their staff. Asking them to ask customers for reviews is well and good, but making it a staff appraisal KPI smacks of desperation. It’s like your stereotypical “me, me, me, look at me” celeb who desperately wants attention but comes off as being so desperate, that even if he or she is exceptionally good, the desperation dominates everything else. And that’s why this crazy method of asking-for-reviews in favour of an employee’s appraisal - if it is indeed becoming commonplace, needs to be thrown into the bin.
Ashraaq Wahab - Director of Marketing and Technical Hospitality Sri Lanka, Automotive Journalist, Marketer, Photographer and Writer, who enjoys penning his thoughts, insights and ideas on a variety of topics.
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