A 97.8% review score is an operations problem
Guests think they are rating hospitality. They are mostly rating logistics.
When a guest leaves a near-perfect review, they usually credit warmth, the welcome, the feeling of being looked after. When they leave a bad one, look closely and it is almost never about warmth. It is a key that did not work, a delayed response, a cleaning that was missed. The score is downstream of operations, not charm.
What actually moves it
A few things carry most of the weight, and none of them are glamorous. Response time, measured in minutes, not hours. Cleaning reliability, which is a scheduling and accountability problem before it is a quality one. Check-in friction, removed before the guest ever feels it. And the speed at which a small problem gets fixed once it appears, because guests forgive almost anything that is handled fast.
People do not rate the absence of problems. They rate how quickly the ones that happen disappear.
System over heroics
The temptation, when you care, is to fix everything personally. That does not scale past a handful of units. What scales is building the operation so the right thing happens without you, then watching the few signals that tell you whether it did. I still read cancellations and complaints myself, not to intervene in each one, but because they are the cheapest information you will ever get about where the system is leaking.
A 97.8% score across hundreds of homes is not a hospitality achievement. It is an operations one, repeated thousands of times, by a team that knows exactly what good looks like.