A guest left you a review in a foreign language? Here's why that's an opportunity

Open the Google profile of any restaurant in central Belgrade, an apartment on Zlatibor, or a winery in Sremski Karlovci and you'll see the same picture: between the local reviews, more and more of them in English, German, Turkish, Russian, Chinese. Tourism is growing, the guests are coming — and they rate you in their own languages.

Most businesses don't reply to those reviews at all. A minority reply in Serbian. And that's exactly where an opportunity hides that would be a shame to waste: a review in a foreign language is a chance to present yourself to an entire market as the host who understands their guests.

Why replying in your own language misses the mark

When you answer a review written in German with a reply in Serbian, you've sent a message — just not the one you intended. The guest who wrote it probably won't understand you. But more importantly: the next guest from Germany, choosing a place to stay and reading reviews in their own language, will see that you answered their compatriot in words he can't read. The conclusion draws itself — "they don't really know what to do with foreigners here".

Google does offer automatic translation of reviews and replies, but it is exactly that: automatic. A machine-translated reply is labelled as such, tends to sound clunky, and the warm tone — the whole reason you write a reply — survives machine translation worst of all.

A reply in the guest's language is a signal, not a courtesy

Replying in the guest's language says three things at once:

• To the guest: we saw you, we understood you, and we cared enough to answer you properly.
• To future guests from the same market: here you can ask, order and complain in your own language — you won't be lost.
• To everyone else: this place hosts guests from all over the world and knows how to handle it. Few things make a Google profile look as professional as a run of tidy replies in three or four languages.

For apartments and hotels this is practically decisive: a foreign guest is choosing between ten listings, knows none of them, and builds trust purely on what the profile shows.

What a good reply looks like — two examples

You don't need essays. The same rules as for local reviews: short, personal, specific. An English review, 5 stars, the guest praises the breakfast and the terrace view:

Dear Emma, thank you so much for your kind words! We're thrilled you enjoyed the breakfast and the view from the terrace — the sunrise really is our favourite part of the day too. We'd love to welcome you back to Zlatibor!

— Your hosts, Apartmani Vidik

A German review, 4 stars, the guest praises the hospitality but notes the parking was tight:

Lieber Herr Schmidt, vielen Dank für Ihre Bewertung! Es freut uns sehr, dass Sie sich bei uns wohlgefühlt haben. Mit dem Parkplatz haben Sie recht — seit diesem Monat haben unsere Gäste zwei zusätzliche Stellplätze direkt am Haus. Wir würden uns freuen, Sie wiederzusehen!

Both replies are three sentences long, mention a concrete detail from the review, and sound like a person rather than a translation engine. That's the whole recipe.

What if you don't speak the language?

Honestly: for most owners this is the real obstacle. A few practical rules:

1. Short beats long. You're less likely to go wrong in three simple sentences than in ten. Thanks, one concrete detail, an invitation to come back.
2. Avoid idioms and jokes. Wordplay and local sayings turn into nonsense in translation — or worse, into an insult.
3. If you use a translator, translate the reply back. Paste the result back into the translator and check how it reads in your own language. If the round trip still makes sense, the reply is probably fine.
4. Build yourself mini-templates. Three or four proven sentences per language for the most common situations, into which you drop the guest's name and a detail from the review — then vary each reply so no two are word-for-word identical.

And one warning from experience: don't mix languages within a single reply. "Dear Emma, hvala Vam puno!" feels charming to you and confusing to everyone else.

How the next guest sees it

Picture a guest from Munich choosing an apartment on Zlatibor for August. They've opened three profiles with similar ratings and similar prices. On the first — reviews with no replies at all. On the second — tidy replies, but all in Serbian. On the third — the German review answered in German, the English one in English, warm and specific.

Where will they feel like an expected guest, and where like a logistics problem? That's exactly how they — and everyone after them — will make the decision. Every review in a foreign language is a question with a known answer: "Can you handle guests like me?" Make sure the answer, in the guest's language, is always — yes.