Reviews, and what to do about a bad one

A golfer stands in the parking lot of a course they have never played, phone out, deciding. They are not reading your website. They are reading the reviews, and more specifically they are reading how you answered them.

That is the part most operators get wrong. A reply is not a conversation with the person who left the review. That person has already made up their mind and is unlikely to change it. The reply is written for the next twenty people who scroll past it, and those twenty are deciding whether this is a course run by somebody who pays attention.

What people actually complain about

Read a few hundred golf course reviews and the same handful comes up again and again:

• Pace of play. Far and away the most common, and the one operators most want to argue about.
• Conditions. Usually greens, usually in a specific window, usually after aeration.
• Value. Almost never about the number on the rate sheet. It is about whether the round matched what the number implied.
• Staff. One interaction at the counter or on the beverage cart, remembered in detail.
• Booking. A tee time that was not there when they arrived, or a rate that changed between the screen and the register.

Four of those five are operational. Which is the useful part: the review section is a free, brutally honest report on the parts of the operation your regulars are too polite to mention.

How to answer

A good reply has three moves and stops.

1. Acknowledge the specific thing. Not "we're sorry you had a poor experience." Name it: the round took five and a half hours, the greens were two weeks off aeration, the starter was short with them.
2. Say what you did or will do. This is the only sentence the next twenty people care about. "We've added a ranger on weekend mornings" tells them something. "We value all feedback" tells them nothing.
3. Offer to take it off the platform. A phone number and a name. Then actually answer when they call.

Never argue about pace of play in public. You will be right, and you will lose.

You will be right because you know the group ahead of them turned a four hour round into five. And you will lose because the reader is not adjudicating, they are forming an impression, and the impression of a course that argues with its customers is the one that sticks.

The bad one that is actually wrong

Sometimes a review is about the wrong course, describes something that did not happen, or comes from somebody who never played. Report it, and set your expectations low: platforms remove reviews that break their own rules, not reviews that are unfair.

The more reliable answer is volume. One angry review sitting near the top of a thin review history is a problem. The same review sitting twelfth in a long, recent, well-answered history is context. You cannot delete your way out of it, but you can out-publish it.

Asking, without being strange about it

Most golfers will leave a review if asked at the right moment, and the right moment is not while they are settling up. It is a few hours later, after a good round, when they are home. A short message that says thanks and makes it one tap will outperform a sign at the counter by a wide margin.

Two things to hold to. Ask everybody, not only the people you think will say something nice, because selective asking is against the rules on every major platform and it produces a review profile that reads as fake anyway. And never offer anything for it. A free sleeve of balls for a five star review is the fastest way to have your reviews thrown out.

What to do this month

• Reply to every review from the last twelve months. Start with the worst one.
• Take the five most recent complaints and sort them into things you can fix and things you cannot. Fix two.
• Pick the moment you will ask, and ask the same way every time.
• Read the reviews of the two courses nearest you. You will learn what your golfers are comparing you against.