Should I ask a client to take down a bad review?

After you've made it right, it's fine to say "if you feel we've resolved this, we'd be grateful if you'd consider updating the review." Asked with pressure or before the fix, it backfires. Many resolved reviews get edited without being asked.

Should I respond to every review, or just the bad ones?

Reply to good ones too, short and warm, a sentence or two. A profile where the owner clearly reads and responds signals a real, cared-for business, and it makes the calm reply to the rare bad one look in character rather than defensive.

What about a review that mentions my crew member by name?

Defend the person in public without attacking the reviewer: "That crew lead has run hundreds of great parties, and we've talked through what happened here." Then handle whatever's real privately. Crew who see you throw them under the bus in a reply stop being crew.

Can I offer a refund to make a bad review go away?

Fix what was actually wrong because it was wrong, and never frame money as payment for deletion, which violates platform rules and reads as exactly what it is. The order matters: make it right, then let the client decide what the review should say.

How to handle a bad review

Reply once, publicly, calmly, within a day or two, with the facts and the fix. Then stop. Prospects read your reply harder than they read the review, because the review tells them one person had a bad day and the reply tells them how you behave under pressure, which is what they're actually shopping for.

First, the ten-minute cooldown

A bad review about your own business reads like an insult to your family, especially in a business where you were personally in that backyard. Feel that fully, privately, and don't type while feeling it. Draft the reply, sit on it, reread it as a stranger, then post. The one unrecoverable move in review management is the heated response, because it screenshots forever.

The reply that works

Four moves, a few sentences total:

Thank and acknowledge, without groveling. "Thanks for the feedback, and we're sorry the day didn't go the way it should have."
State the facts, briefly, if they're on your side. "Our records show the crew arrived at 1:10 for the 2:00 window, and the delay came from the locked gate we called about." Calm, specific, no adjectives. If the client is simply right, skip this move and own it: "We got this one wrong."
Name the fix. What you did or changed: "We've refunded the add-on that didn't run" or "we've changed our arrival confirmations so this can't happen again." A named fix is the sentence prospects remember.
Take it offline. "We'd love to make this right, and we've reached out directly." Then actually reach out. Some bad reviews become edited reviews after a good phone call, and even when they don't, the public record shows you tried.

What never goes in the reply: the client's personal details, blame-shifting, sarcasm, lawyers, or a point-by-point rebuttal. Three sentences of grace beat three paragraphs of being right.

When the review is false or isn't even your client

Wrong business, a no-show who never booked, a competitor, or claims that plainly didn't happen: reply once with calm facts, "we have no record of a booking under this name and would love to sort out any confusion," and flag it to the platform for removal. Removal works sometimes. The public reply works every time, because readers can smell a fake against a business that responds like an adult.

The real defense is volume

A single two-star review in a wall of five-stars reads as an outlier and can even make the wall look more credible. The same review as one of your six total reviews is a quarter of your reputation. The durable strategy for bad reviews is mostly about good ones: ask every client, the day after, with a direct link, and the occasional rough one sinks into a sea of great ones. Review velocity is the moat.

The line to remember

You're not replying to the reviewer, you're performing for the hundred parents who'll read the exchange next spring. Give them a professional to book.