Two businesses on the same street, same service, same prices. One has 140 reviews and the other has 9. The first one gets the calls, and no amount of website work closes that gap.
The problem specific to a tourist area
A happy customer in a Spanish city might review you next week. A happy customer in Guardamar flies home on Sunday, unpacks, goes back to work and never thinks about your restaurant again. Your window is not a week — it is the hour after they pay. If you are not asking inside that hour, you are losing almost all of them.
What is allowed and what is not
- Allowed: asking. Directly, in person, by message, on the receipt. There is no rule against asking.
- Allowed: making it easy — a QR code, a short link, a card with the code on it.
- Not allowed: paying for reviews, or offering a discount or a free coffee in exchange. It breaks Google's terms and it is unfair commercial practice under Spanish consumer law.
- Not allowed: asking only the customers you know are happy. Google calls that review gating and it can cost you the listing.
- Not allowed: reviews written by staff, family or yourself. Google detects same-device and same-network patterns.
The free-drink-for-a-review sign is common on the coast and it is still a bad idea. Beyond the rules, a stream of five-star reviews all posted in the same week reads as bought to anyone reading them.
What actually works
- Get your short review link. In Business Profile it is under "Ask for reviews" — a google.com/… address that opens the review box directly, with no searching.
- Turn it into a QR code and put it where the customer already is: the receipt, the table, the invoice, the back of the card you hand over.
- Ask at the right moment, which is the moment they thank you. That is the only time the answer is instinctively yes.
- Ask with a specific sentence. "Would you mind leaving a review?" is easy to dodge. "It really helps us if you mention what you had — takes 30 seconds" gets a much better rate.
- Send it in writing afterwards if you have their number, once, the same day. Not three days later.
Which language they should be in
Both, if your customers are both. Google reads review text, and reviews mentioning your service in Spanish help you appear for Spanish searches. A listing with 60 reviews all in English is quietly telling Google which market you serve — useful if that is the plan, a limitation if it is not.
Answer every one of them
Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by every future customer and does more good than the complaint does harm. What damages you is a one-star review sitting there unanswered for a year, or an angry reply.