Review Request Email for Travel Brands

Send the ask while the trip is still fresh. Guests who get the request within 48 hours of checkout leave reviews at four to six times the rate of guests contacted a week later, and those early reviews run a full star higher because the memory has not faded. For a hotel, trigger off checkout in your property management system (Mews, Cloudbeds, or Opera). For a tour or activity operator, trigger off trip completed in FareHarbor, Rezdy, or Peek. Never trigger off booking confirmation, because the guest has not traveled yet and a request that early reads as a receipt.

Pick your review destination and commit to one. Tour operators and experience brands should send to TripAdvisor, where travelers read seven to twelve reviews before they book and a single new review lifts a profile's ranking inside the popularity index. Hotels and short-term rentals should send to Google, where reviews feed the map pack and the star score that shows up in search. Do not stack a Google button next to a TripAdvisor button. Two destinations split the click and halve the review you actually wanted.

The offer is where travel brands get banned. TripAdvisor's content policy forbids incentivized reviews and will slap a penalty badge on a property caught paying for them, and Google removes reviews tied to a discount or a contest. Skip "leave a 5-star review for 10 percent off." What works instead is an outcome frame: tell the guest their words help the next traveler pick the right trip, and if you want to give something, make it an unconditional thank-you on the next stay ("next time you are up, breakfast is on us") that is not conditioned on a review being left or being positive.

Copy is sensory and specific. Name the suite, the guide, the moment. A request that says "the sunrise paddle on Day 2" outperforms "how was your trip?" by roughly 20 percent on review completion, because a specific memory is easy to write about and a generic one is not. Keep it near 90 words. Guests write reviews from their phones in line at the airport, and a long email gets skimmed past.

Example subject line: "How was your stay, Jordan?" Example body: "Jordan, thanks for spending the long weekend at Northbound Lodge. We hope the sunrise paddle and dinner by the fire were the highlight. If you have a minute, a quick review on TripAdvisor helps other travelers find us. No pressure either way. We would love to have you back up the mountain." Numbers we see on this template: open rates of 38 to 45 percent because the send reads as a personal follow-up, and review completion of 6 to 9 percent when the request lands inside the 48-hour window, against 1 to 2 percent once it slips past five days.

Travel review requests get opened on the move. A guest reads yours in an airport lounge on an iPhone in dark mode, in a Gmail tab on a Samsung, and sometimes in Outlook at a corporate travel desk. The build has to survive all three.

Nested tables, not divs. Every container is an HTML table locked to a 600px shell with fixed pixel widths on the columns. CSS grid and flexbox do not exist in the Outlook Word engine and render as a single stacked column in older Android mail clients. Tables are the one layout every inbox parses the same way.

Inline CSS on each element. Gmail strips large parts of the head style block once a message passes a size threshold, and several webmail clients ignore the head entirely. Font, size, color, and padding live as inline attributes on the cell, the text, and the link that needs them. Shared defaults still sit in the head for clients that read it, but nothing critical depends on the head surviving.

A bulletproof button for Outlook. Outlook 2007 through 2019 render mail with Microsoft Word, which ignores border-radius and background color on an anchor tag and turns your coral button into a flat, colorless rectangle that is hard to tap. The MJML button component emits a VML fallback (an mso rounded rectangle drawn behind the link) so Word paints a solid, fully clickable button in your brand color. Every other client renders the normal anchor.

Live text, not image text. The headline, the body, and the five stars are real text, not a hero image. Travel emails that bake the ask into a photo fail three ways at once: spam filters score image-heavy commercial mail lower, the copy disappears when images are blocked on mobile data, and the message is invisible to a screen reader. The only images here are the logo and, optionally, one stay photo.

Dark mode handled. The head carries a color-scheme meta tag that tells Apple Mail, Outlook, and Gmail the message supports dark, plus a supported-color-schemes tag for older clients. The logo sits on a transparent background so it does not show up as a white badge on a black canvas, and the button stays a solid coral fill that inverts cleanly.

One mobile media query. A single max-width 600px block bumps the headline down a point, pulls the body padding to the edges, and keeps the button full width for a thumb tap. No per-client overrides beyond the dark mode set, because every extra rule is another thing to break on a phone you do not own.

Fonts fall back. The editorial serif stack (Georgia, then Times New Roman, then the generic serif keyword) renders on every client. A custom web font loads only in Apple Mail and the Gmail app, so the fallback has to look right on its own. It does.

Copy the full HTML export from this page.

In Klaviyo, open the flow you want, or create one. Trigger it off the right event from your property or booking system: for a hotel, Checked Out or a custom Stay Completed metric from Mews or Cloudbeds; for a tour operator, Trip Completed or Tour Date Passed from FareHarbor, Rezdy, or Peek. Add a time delay of 24 to 48 hours for hotels, or one to three days for multi-day trips, so the request lands while the memory is fresh but the guest is home. Drop in an email, switch the message type, drag an HTML block into the canvas, and paste the template into the block source. For a full-code message, choose a plain text email and edit the source.

Swap the brand. Replace "Northbound Lodge," the logo image URL, the two brand hex values (deep teal and coral), and every link. Update the address and social links in the footer.

Wire your merge tags. The guest first name is {{ first_name|default:'there' }}. If your PMS or booking platform passes the suite, guide, or trip name as a custom property, reference it with {{ person|lookup:'room_name' }} or {{ event|lookup:'experience_name' }} so the email names the exact stay. The review button links to your TripAdvisor review form (grab it from your management center under Write a review, then copy the URL) or your Google Business Profile review shortcut (the g.page/r/XXXX/review link). Pick one, never both.

In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code, and drop the HTML in. For automation, run a Customer Journey off an API event from your PMS or booking tool, with a wait step of a day or two after checkout or trip completion. Use *|FNAME|* for the first name and custom merge fields like *|ROOMNAME|* or *|TRIPNAME|* for the specifics.

Test before you schedule. Send a proof to an iPhone with dark mode on, Gmail on the web, and Outlook on Windows. Click the review button on a real phone and confirm it opens the TripAdvisor or Google form, not your homepage. Check that merge tags resolve to real data instead of raw tag text. Run Litmus or Email on Acid if you have it. Travel brands lose direct bookings to a review button that 404s more often than to weak copy.