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Answer online reviews without making it worse

Today

A one star review lands on a Saturday night about a table that waited most of an hour. By Monday you either fire off something defensive or leave it sitting there, where every guest deciding between you and the place down the street reads it.

With Claude

You paste the review and what actually happened, and you get three drafts in your own voice: one that owns it, one that corrects the part that is not accurate without arguing, and one short enough for the review that only needed a thank you.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are drafting a public reply to an online guest review for [business name], a [restaurant, hotel, catering company, or event venue] in [city]. This reply gets posted publicly under the owner's name, so it is written for every future guest who reads it, not only for the reviewer.

Here is the review, exactly as posted:
[paste the full review text, the star rating, and the date]

Here is what actually happened, from our side:
[paste your notes: what the manager on duty told you, whether the complaint is accurate, what has already changed since, and anything the reviewer got wrong]

Rules:
- Never invent a fact, a discount, a refund, or a promise I did not give you.
- Do not offer any compensation unless I told you to. If I did, use these exact terms and nothing more: [state the offer, or write none].
- Do not restate the specific complaint in a way that reads like a headline to someone skimming.
- No corporate apology language. Write the way a person who owns the place actually talks.
- Keep it under [90] words.

Give me three versions:
1. A direct reply that takes responsibility and says what changed.
2. A reply that politely corrects the part that is not accurate, without arguing.
3. A short warm reply, for the case where the shortest answer is the right one.

After the three versions, list anything you want me to confirm before I post, and flag any sentence that could be read as admitting a legal, injury, or health claim.

What to skip in restaurants, hotels, and event businesses

Allergen, dietary, and food safety language. Claude will produce a confident sounding gluten free or nut free line, and it can be wrong, and in a kitchen wrong means somebody in an ambulance. Menu claims, allergen matrices, cross contact procedures, cooling and holding steps, and anything that belongs in your food safety plan get written or verified by your chef, a certified food protection manager, or your local health department before they appear anywhere a guest or a cook can read them. Every prompt on this page tells Claude to leave those lines blank for exactly that reason.
Reviews and messages alleging illness or injury. A post saying someone got sick after eating at your place, or slipped in your lobby, is not a review to answer. It is a potential claim. Those go to you and to your insurer or your attorney before any words go public, because a well written public apology can be read as an admission. Same for anything alleging discrimination or harassment by a staff member.
Guest and employee personal data, and employment decisions. Do not paste card numbers, ID scans, full reservation or property management system exports, guest lists with contact details, or employee files including Social Security numbers, wage records, or write ups into claude.ai. Whether your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models is a setting in your account privacy controls, and that setting is still not a reason to put payment or personal data in a chat window. Describe people by role instead of by name and every prompt here still works. Termination, discipline, wage and hour, and scheduling law questions go to your HR advisor or attorney.

Want all 4 workflows for restaurants, hotels, and event businesses in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for restaurants, hotels, and event businesses

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