A small Dutch hotel group came to us with a painful question: why does our Google rating keep slipping when our guests tell us, face to face, that they loved their stay? The answer, as usual, was in the gap between what guests say in person and what they post online. Here’s the prototype we built to close it.

Interactive prototype

Gelukkig — Inbox, Trends, and Settings views. Tap a feedback card to open the recovery drawer, change status, or add a note.

Open in new tab

Best experienced on a laptop or desktop. Use “Open in new tab” above for a full-screen view of the inbox, NPS trends, and recovery flow.

The problem

The Review Platform Is the Brand

For an independent hotel, B&B, or restaurant, a Google rating isn’t a vanity metric — it’s the storefront. Each star below 4.5 quietly costs bookings. One scathing review can sit at the top of search results for years. And the guest who wrote it? They probably mentioned the broken shower to the front desk on the way out. Nobody followed up. Twelve hours later, it was already public.

The industry’s usual answer is review gating: only invite happy customers to leave reviews, quietly suppress the rest. It works until Google catches you. It’s also a violation of Google’s guidelines and, under EU consumer law, a deceptive practice. Our client didn’t want to game the system. They wanted a fair one.

The brief in one sentence: “Give us a private window to fix problems before guests post — then invite every guest to review us publicly, not just the happy ones.”

12h
Recovery window before review invite
100%
Of guests invited to review
0
Reviews filtered or suppressed
The workflow

One Spec, Three Surfaces: Capture, Recover, Invite

We wrote the spec first. Three surfaces, one guest journey. Capture: a 30-second NPS form the guest reaches via SMS or a QR code at reception. Recover: a manager inbox that routes every submission through a recovery window — 2, 6, 12, or 24 hours, the venue picks. Unhappy guest? The manager sees it in real time, reaches out, makes it right. Invite: when the window closes, every guest receives a review link. Promoters, passives, detractors. No filter.

The manager’s inbox is the heart of the product. It looks like an email client built for empathy: cards tinted by NPS band, a status tag on each (new, contacted, resolved), filters for Happy / Neutral / Unhappy, and a detail drawer with the guest’s comment, contact details, and a running note thread. The Trends view answers the one question an owner actually asks: are we getting better or worse than last period? — with NPS score, total feedback, response rate, and recovery rate all shown against the previous window.

The guest never sees any of this. They scan a QR at the table, give a score and a sentence, and either hear from the venue within hours or get a friendly review link the next morning. Either way, the outcome is fair. Either way, their voice counts.

The test wasn’t “does this boost ratings?” It was: can a duty manager, between shifts, turn a 3-star complaint into a 5-star review without lying to anyone?

The bar we set for the first pilot

Because the spec drives the build, changing the recovery window, adding a channel, adjusting the NPS bands, or plugging in a different review platform — Google, Tripadvisor, Booking.com — is an edit to the document, not a quarter of ticket work. The same spec that gave us this prototype will power the production build, the onboarding flow, the Dutch translations, and the GDPR data-retention rules.

Ethical reputation management isn’t about who you invite. It’s about who you help first.

spec-first development hospitality software reputation management NPS ethical review gating AI-native development