Post-Stay Review Email Templates

A post-stay review email is a message sent after checkout asking a guest to rate their stay on Google, TripAdvisor, or whichever platform they booked through, and the templates below are built specifically for hotels and vacation rentals — with guidance on timing after checkout, routing guests to the right platform depending on how they booked, and language that works across languages without sounding automated. The general principles from our review request email template guide still apply here — a short subject line, one clear ask, a single obvious button — but hospitality has specific wrinkles a generic template misses: which platform to point a guest toward depends entirely on how they booked, and automated post-stay review requests matter more here than in most industries because a property juggling dozens of checkouts a day can't realistically send these by hand and expect consistent timing. When to send a post-stay review request Timing matters more for hospitality than almost any other industry, because the memory of a stay fades fast and guests are often traveling again within days. A request sent the morning after checkout, while the trip is still fresh and before the next destination's logistics take over someone's attention, consistently outperforms one sent a week later buried in a generic newsletter. A practical cadence most properties can build around: Day after checkout: the first ask, timed to the morning so it's not competing with a late checkout or a travel day's chaos. Day 4–5 if no response: one gentle follow-up, never more than one, for guests who haven't opened or clicked the first email. Skip anything past a week. A review request that arrives ten days after a stay reads as disconnected from the actual experience, and open rates drop sharply the further out you send. Routing the request to the right platform This is the piece that trips up hospitality teams most often. A guest who booked direct through your website should be pointed to Google (and TripAdvisor, if that matters to your property) — you control that request fully. A guest who booked through Booking.com, Expedia, or Airbnb has already received, or will receive, that platform's own built-in review invitation, and you generally can't trigger or substitute for it with your own direct ask on that specific platform. Our guides on Booking.com reviews and Airbnb reviews for hosts cover each platform's own review flow in more depth. The practical fix: segment your post-stay email list by booking source before sending, and only send a direct Google/TripAdvisor ask to guests who booked direct. For OTA bookings, a thank-you email without a review ask (or with a soft, platform-appropriate nudge, where the OTA's terms allow it) keeps the guest relationship warm without asking for something you can't actually deliver through that channel. Core post-stay email template (direct bookings) Subject: How was your stay, [Guest Name]? Hi [Guest Name], Thank you for staying with us at [Property Name]. We hope you had a wonderful time, and we'd love to hear how it went. If you have a minute, a short review helps other travelers get a real sense of what to expect — and it means a lot to our team. [ Leave a review → ] Thank you again for choosing us, [Your name], [Property Name] Variations by stay type Multi-night hotel stay "Hi [Guest Name], thank you for spending [X] nights with us. We hope everything — from check-in to checkout — met your expectations. If you have a moment, we'd be grateful for a quick review: [button]." Short-term rental / vacation rental "Hi [Guest Name], thanks for staying at [Property Name]! We hope the space felt like home. If you enjoyed your stay, a review helps future guests know what to expect — and helps us keep improving: [button]." Business traveler "Hi [Guest Name], thank you for choosing [Property Name] for your trip. If your stay met your needs, a brief review would help other business travelers planning their own visit: [button]." Repeat guest "Hi [Guest Name], welcome back — and thank you for choosing us again. If you have 30 seconds, a review from a returning guest carries real weight with first-time visitors: [button]." Gentle follow-up (no response to first email) "Hi [Guest Name], just circling back in case our first note got buried in your travel inbox. The review link is still here if you have a moment: [button]. No worries if now isn't the time." Multi-language considerations Properties with an international guest base get measurably better response rates sending the request in the guest's own language rather than defaulting to English for everyone. Whether Tailwind's automated review request flow supports sending in the guest's detected or preferred language out of the box, or requires a manually translated template per language, depends on the current state of that feature — confirm before promising full multi-language automation to a prospective customer. At minimum, keep a translated version of your core template ready for your top two or three guest languages, and apply it based on the language the reservation was made in or the guest's stated nationality, rather than guessing from a name. What never belongs in a post-stay request No incentive tied to leaving a review. A discount code, a free upgrade, or a drawing entry offered in exchange for a review — even framed loosely as a "thank you" — crosses into the kind of incentivized review the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) targets directly. Our guide on why review gating is a legal risk covers the mechanics in more depth. No filtering by how the stay went. Send the same request to every guest, regardless of whether housekeeping fielded a complaint mid-stay or checkout was smooth. Skipping guests you suspect were unhappy is review gating in practice, even without a formal policy saying so. No requests through Yelp. Yelp's terms prohibit soliciting reviews outright. If your property has a Yelp presence, monitor and respond to what's there — never add Yelp to a review-request email campaign. Subject lines that get opened in a travel inbox Guests coming home from a trip are often sorting through a backlog of email, so a subject line that reads as personal and quick to deal with beats one that sounds like a marketing blast: "How was your stay at [Property Name]?" "Thanks for staying with us, [Guest Name]" "Got a quick minute for us, [Guest Name]?" "We'd love to hear about your trip" "One quick favor before you unpack 🧳" Don't send these manually forever A single property with a handful of checkouts a week can manage this by hand for a while. Once you're running a hotel with daily turnover, or managing several vacation rental listings, manual sending is where timing discipline breaks down first — someone forgets a day, a guest checks out on a holiday weekend nobody's monitoring, and the request goes out late or not at all. Segmenting by booking source adds another layer of manual work most small teams don't sustain for long: remembering which guest booked direct versus through an OTA, every single checkout, without a system tracking it, is the kind of task that quietly stops happening the first busy week. Tailwind's review request generator can produce a ready-to-send template for your specific situation — direct booking or OTA, first ask or follow-up — in under a minute, and Tailwind's automated requests can trigger the email (and a follow-up text) at the right moment after checkout without anyone remembering to do it manually. Prefer texting for some guests? Our review request text message templates cover that channel too. FAQ: post-stay review email templates Should I send a review request before or after the guest leaves a payment review? After checkout, once the stay is actually complete — a request sent mid-stay reads as premature and can come across as pressuring a guest who hasn't finished forming an opinion yet. Can I offer a discount on a future stay for leaving a review? No. Offering anything of value tied to leaving a review — a discount code, a free night, a point bonus — is an incentivized review under FTC guidance, regardless of how it's framed in the email copy. A thank-you discount sent to every guest regardless of whether they review you is fine; one conditioned on the review is not. What if a guest already left a review on the OTA they booked through? Thank them without asking for a second review elsewhere. Asking a guest to duplicate a review across multiple platforms can read as review-count padding to anyone comparing your profiles, and some platforms' terms discourage soliciting reviews that already exist elsewhere for the same stay. How many follow-up emails is too many? More than one. A single gentle follow-up for guests who haven't responded is reasonable; a third or fourth reminder starts to feel like pressure rather than a polite ask, and risks annoying a guest enough to leave a negative review about the emails themselves. Every review from Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Airbnb and Vrbo in one inbox → Try Tailwind free. Tailwind runs $5 a month per tool, or $50 a month for the Full plan covering everything, with the first month free and no card required to start.