SUM-UP
People pick the bar with the line out the door. Your experience is judged the same way. Almost half of guests will not even consider a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and they want the reviews to be fresh. Reviews, and how visibly you show them, decide whether guests see a full bar or an empty one.
Hey, it is Lasse, founder of Understory.
Welcome to the fourth issue of Fully Booked, where I share one thing every week that helps you grow your experience business. Today: the perception of the full bar, and how to build it on purpose.
Picture two bars on the same street. Same beer, same prices. One is packed with a line outside. The other has three empty stools and a bartender staring at his phone. You know which one you walk into. Not because you have proof it is better, but because everyone else already made that choice for you.
Nobody wants to be the first one in the empty bar.
Now picture a guest on your booking page. She does not know your guide, your kitchen, your studio. She is about to spend money and an afternoon on something she cannot try first. What she is really asking is: has anyone else done this and loved it?
If the answer on your page is silence, that is the empty bar.
This is not just a feeling. In a randomized experiment in a restaurant, simply telling guests which five dishes were the most popular lifted demand for those dishes by 13 to 20 percent. Nothing else changed. Not the food, not the price. People just saw what others chose.
Reviews are your line outside the door
Reviews are the most direct way to show the line. And the bar has gone up. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 97 percent of people read reviews before choosing a local business. Almost half will not even consider a business with fewer than 20 reviews. One in three will only book a business rated 4.5 or higher, nearly double the year before.
So there is a critical mass, and it is around 20. Below that, you are not in the game.
But volume is only half of it. The other half is freshness. 74 percent look for reviews written in the last three months. A third want them from the last two weeks. Twenty great reviews with the newest one from last summer is its own red flag. The visitor might think “Is the business even still operating?”
The fix is boring and it works: ask every guest, every time, right after the experience while the feeling is still there. Not a campaign twice a year. A habit. Automate it with Understory Reviews.
One thing you can stop worrying about: a perfect 5.0. For experiences, getting to critical mass and freshness with a good 4.5 or higher score can be more than enough.
If you have them, then show them
Most operators I meet have great reviews. Far fewer show them where the decision is made.
Your guest meets you in three places, and the full bar has to be visible in all of them:
- On Google (and in AIs). This is where she first sees your name. Your rating and review count are the first thing she reads, before she ever clicks.
- In your ads. Stars in the ad itself. Google says seller ratings alone lift click-through rate by up to 10 percent.
- On your website and booking page. Not on a separate “testimonials” page three clicks away. In the top, next to the price and the book button, everywhere the doubt lives.
Northwestern also found that going from zero to five visible reviews on a product page increased the chance of purchase by 270 percent. Not 27. Two hundred and seventy.
Beyond reviews: show the room is busy
Reviews say people came. Availability says business is booming and people are coming.
An open calendar where every slot on every day is free is the empty bar again. A calendar with a few sold out slots, and “3 spots left” on the one she is looking at, is the room filling up. Live availability is social proof you already own. Show it.
If you run daily tours or classes, go one step further: “142 guests joined us this week”.
Do you remember the “Someone from Rome just booked this hotel” from Booking.com? They were famous for using this tactic in the early days. They did it for years, because data showed them that it worked.
What to do this week
- Ensure you are collecting reviews automatically post-experience. Remember this can be automated with Understory Reviews, write me if you want it.
- Open your booking page on your phone and count how many seconds it takes before you see a review, a rating or a sign that others have booked. If the answer is “I had to scroll”, you need to fix that.
- Then check the date on your newest review. If it is older than three months, send a review request to your last 20 guests today and get a fresh batch in.
Talk soon,
Lasse
Co-founder and CEO, Understory
PS. If you are on Understory, reviews and live availability can sit right in your booking flow and checkout. Check it out at understory.io/reviews.
Sources
- Cai, Chen and Fang, “Observational Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment”, American Economic Review, 2009. aeaweb.org
- BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. brightlocal.com
- Northwestern Medill Spiegel Research Center, “How Online Reviews Influence Sales”. spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu
- Google Ads Help, “About seller ratings”. support.google.com
