The review is still the most valuable local asset

With so many new formats around, it is easy to forget the obvious: what still pushes someone to walk into a place for the first time is what another person said about it.

And now those same opinions are also the raw material behind the automatic recommendations more and more people read before deciding. A review counts twice these days.

Asking for them is not bad taste

Plenty of happy customers never leave a review simply because it does not occur to them. Asking at the right moment — at the end, when someone tells you they enjoyed it — is not being pushy, it is being a reminder.

Reply to the good ones too

Almost everyone only replies to the bad ones, and defensively. Replying to the good ones takes twenty seconds and does two things: whoever wrote it feels seen, and whoever reads it later sees there is someone paying attention.

When a bad one arrives

Nobody reads a bad review on its own: they read it next to your reply. A calm, specific answer that does not argue with the whole account usually leaves a better impression than five good reviews in a row. What really does damage is silence, or taking the bait.

And above all, do not invent them

Do not ask people who never came, and do not write them yourself. They get spotted, they sink your credibility at once, and there is no way back. Ten real reviews are worth more than a hundred fake ones.