How EatNow sends your happiest guests to Google and keeps disappointed ones in a private conversation with you.
This is the heart of the feature. When a guest rates their visit, EatNow decides — instantly, based on the rating — whether to send them to a public platform or to keep the feedback private.
The guest is redirected to your Google (or TripAdvisor) page to write their review there.
1 to 4 stars → private
The guest is asked to explain what went wrong. The comment stays in EatNow, visible only to your team.
The threshold is exactly 5 stars. A 4-star rating — however good it looks — stays private. That’s deliberate: your public rating only goes up if only 5-star guests post.
Go to Settings > Notifications > General, Guest tab, Restaurant sub-tab, then find Review collection channels.
Pick where satisfied guests should be sent. At least one channel must stay selected.
Channel
What it does
Internal reviews
Collects the rating inside EatNow first, and only redirects the 5-star ones. This is the filter.
Google Reviews
Sends 5-star guests to your Google Business page. Requires a connected Google integration.
TripAdvisor
Sends 5-star guests to your TripAdvisor page. Requires a connected TripAdvisor integration.
A greyed-out card with “Connect Google to activate” or “Connect TripAdvisor to activate” means the integration isn’t ready. Connect it in Settings > Integrations > Integrations list first.
Every guest lands on your private form, whatever their rating. You collect honest feedback, but no review is ever pushed to Google or TripAdvisor.Best for: a restaurant that wants to listen to its guests without touching its public rating yet.
Internal reviews + Google (or TripAdvisor) — the recommended setup
Every guest rates first. 5-star guests are forwarded to the platform to post publicly; everyone else writes to you privately.Best for: almost everyone. This is the setup that raises your public rating while giving you the negative feedback in private.
Google (or TripAdvisor) without internal reviews — no filter
With Internal reviews switched off, the guest is sent to the platform as soon as they open the message, without rating anything first. Every guest, happy or not, ends up on your public page.Best for: nobody who wants protection. Only use this if you specifically want to drive all traffic straight to a platform.
In this setup there is no filter at all. A disappointed guest goes straight to your public page.
If both Google and TripAdvisor are enabled, EatNow alternates between them at random for each 5-star guest. That spreads your new reviews across both platforms instead of piling them on one.
They’re taken straight to the review form on Google or TripAdvisor, already signed in to their own account. They write and post the review themselves.In EatNow, the feedback is recorded with a Redirected to Google badge. No comment is stored — the guest wrote it on the platform, not on your form.
2
The guest gives 1 to 4 stars
A comment box opens: “What did you think of your experience with us?”. They write, they submit, and it stops there — nothing goes public.
Below 5 stars, the guest writes to you privately.
In EatNow, the feedback appears in Reviews > Internal feedback with an Internal badge, and your team is notified.
Yes — with one important nuance. You are not buying, faking or filtering reviews on the platform itself. You are choosing who you invite to review you, which every business does. What matters:
The review is always written by the guest, on the platform, in their own words.
No incentive, discount or gift is offered in exchange for a review.
Guests who are unhappy are never blocked from reviewing you publicly — they can still go to Google on their own at any time.
EatNow never posts, edits or deletes a review on Google or TripAdvisor on your behalf. The only thing it can publish is your reply to a Google review, and only when you click send.
