If you've ever received a rating from an international guest that was lower than you expected, the natural instinct is to wonder what went wrong during the stay. Were they unhappy with the property? Did something break?
Sometimes. But often, the problem is something more specific and more fixable than that.
What international guests experience differently
A guest who speaks fluent English, who's familiar with American appliances, who's stayed in short-term rentals before — that guest walks into your property and navigates it relatively easily. A guest who doesn't speak English well, who's never used a gas fireplace or an American washer and dryer, has a fundamentally different experience of the same property.
The fireplace they couldn't figure out isn't just an inconvenience — it's a source of anxiety. Is this safe? Is this going to damage the property? The washing machine with buttons in English isn't just confusing — is this detergent or bleach? Is this the right cycle?
These moments of confusion accumulate over a stay. They rarely turn into a complaint to the host directly, but they shape how the guest felt about the whole experience, and that feeling shows up in the star rating.
What hosts observe
Hosts who track their ratings carefully sometimes notice domestic and international guests, staying in the same property in the same season, rating it differently on average. The property hasn't changed — what's changed is how easy it is to navigate for someone without fluent English.
In STR communities, this comes up especially around appliances: guests afraid to use a hot tub because they couldn't read the instructions, or guests who hand-washed clothes for a week rather than risk the washer. These guests didn't necessarily have a bad stay — they had an incomplete one, because the information wasn't accessible to them.
The translation problem
The reflex answer is to translate the welcome book. That creates its own problem — which languages? A property in a popular market might host guests from five or six different countries in a single month, and a welcome book trying to cover all of them tends to work well for none of them.
What a QR-based system helps with
A QR code on an appliance sidesteps much of the language problem in a simple way. A guest scans the code and, where the manufacturer has one, lands on a short video that shows the controls. Watching someone operate the hot tub or the washing machine doesn't require reading a paragraph of English; it requires watching a short clip.
If you've added the AI guest agent, guests can also text a question directly. It answers in English today, so it works best for guests comfortable typing in English — but for the appliance basics, a video does a lot of the work regardless of language.
The real issue
The rating gap between domestic and international guests usually isn't about the property being worse for international visitors — it's about the property being harder to navigate without assuming fluent English. Most welcome books and instruction sheets are written with a fluent English speaker in mind. When the guest doesn't match that assumption, the experience degrades.
Fixing it doesn't require rebuilding anything. A video works much the same way for every guest, because it doesn't rely on reading English in the first place.