Show Airbnb and Google Reviews on Your Website

Your social proof is working for the wrong website

You have years of five-star reviews. They’re doing an excellent job of converting visitors into bookings — on a channel that takes a commission on every one of those bookings.

On your own site, where a booking costs you nothing but a card fee, a visitor sees photographs and a price and has no evidence that anyone has ever stayed. That’s the single biggest conversion gap on most direct-booking pages, and it’s fixable.

Here’s how to close it, what’s actually allowed, and the mistakes that cause trouble.

First: what you’re allowed to do

Before any implementation, the part most guides skip.

Google reviews may be displayed on your own site, and Google’s display terms require you to attribute them — show the reviewer’s name and make clear the review came from Google. Don’t present them as unattributed testimonials. The official route is the Places API, and it comes with two hard limits worth knowing before you plan around it: a maximum of five reviews, and no owner replies. There is a richer API that returns the full set with replies; access to it is granted case by case, and our own experience is that it cannot simply be enabled on request.

Airbnb has no public reviews API. Scraping your listing page is against their terms and breaks whenever the page changes. The route that is legitimate and stable is the one you already have: the notification email Airbnb sends you when a guest leaves a review. It’s your email, about your property, sent to you.

Any review you display should be a real review, attributed accurately. Inventing testimonials or presenting a review from one platform as if it came from another is a consumer-protection problem in most jurisdictions, quite apart from being obvious to anyone who checks.

The reliable route: your own inbox

If you’re doing this properly rather than copy-pasting, the durable source is email.

Every channel emails you when a review lands. Connect that mailbox to something that can read those notifications, and each review becomes a structured record — reviewer, rating, text, date, source — without you retyping anything. Pair it with a periodic pull from your Google Business Profile for the Google side, and both sources converge into one list.

Three things will bite you, and all three are worth designing for:

The email is often a preview, not the review. We proved this against a stored notification: the second half of one review appears in neither the plain-text nor the HTML body. The email truncates. If you display what arrived, you publish half a review that ends mid-sentence. The fix is to flag those as partial and paste the full text once — and to derive the flag from the facts rather than storing it, so it keeps working when a second source starts truncating too.

Some emails contain a private note. Several channels include a private “note from the guest” section alongside the public review. One real example we looked at was a complaint about noisy neighbours — helpful feedback for the host, actively harmful if published on that host’s own website. Never import it.

Character encoding. Notification emails are frequently base64-encoded UTF-8. Decode them naively and “We’ve” becomes “We’ve” across every review you import. It looks like carelessness to a visitor, which for a review is exactly the wrong signal.

Where to put them

Getting reviews into a database is half the job. The half that converts is placement.

On your booking page or widget. This is the highest-value spot, because it’s the last thing a visitor sees before deciding. If you embed a booking widget on your own site, the reviews should be able to sit inside it — either as a tab beside the booking form or as a separate strip elsewhere on the page.

A small design decision matters here: reviews should load when someone asks for them, not on every page load. Keep the booking path fast; a visitor who never opens the reviews tab shouldn’t pay for it.

On a dedicated page. A /reviews page gives you something to link to from email signatures and social profiles, and it ranks for your property name plus “reviews” — a query people genuinely type when they’re deciding.

On your listing page, above the fold-ish. The star rating and count near the price, the reviews themselves further down.

If your site is running on something you don’t want to rebuild, an iframe embed is the pragmatic answer — the snippet carries its own identity in its URL, so it resolves the right property on any domain.

Four pitfalls

Publishing pending reviews. If you have a moderation step, make sure unmoderated reviews are genuinely excluded from the public page and from the headline rating. We shipped exactly this bug: the page fetched both published and pending reviews and counted them in the average. Anything awaiting a decision was already live and already moving the number.

Showing a typed review as a verified one. If you can add a review by hand — and you should be able to, for the guest who emailed you instead — then how it arrived must be recorded and shown. Without that, a review you typed is indistinguishable from one the channel sent. On the first real account we did this for, it was 22 imported against 4 typed, identical on the public page until we marked them.

Cherry-picking only the five-star ones. A page of nothing but perfect scores reads as fake, because it usually is. A handful of four-stars with a good owner response converts better than uniform perfection.

Forgetting the owner response. A calm, specific reply to a mediocre review is often the most persuasive thing on the page. Note that if you’re pulling from Google’s Places API, replies don’t come through — you’ll need to add them your side.

If you’re not taking direct bookings at all

Worth saying, because it’s a common position: you might keep your existing website and your channels and use accounting software purely for the books, with no public booking page anywhere.

You can still put your reviews on your own site. A reviews-only embed doesn’t need a booking page behind it — it’s your reviews, on your domain, doing the convincing. Whether the booking then happens through a channel or a phone call is a separate decision.

The honest summary

The reviews you’ve earned are an asset you already own and mostly don’t control. Getting them onto your own property — attributed correctly, moderated, with responses, and next to your booking form — is one of the few marketing jobs that’s genuinely one-off.

Related: Your Reviews, On Every Surface You Own for how Airflow does the ingestion, Your Reviews Are Your Most Underused Asset for the commercial case, and Go Live on Your Own Terms for where the embeds go. Or look at Airflow’s features.