Display Booking.com Reviews on a TV Screen: What Works Now

You can display Booking.com reviews on a TV screen today, but in TVpilot it is not a live feed yet. Our native Booking.com review widget is coming soon. Until it ships, the practical route is a score slide you update yourself (from Canva or a PDF), playing in the same loop as live review widgets for the platforms that already work.

That combination fits how most hotels, guesthouses and B&Bs actually collect feedback. Guests leave a score on Booking.com, a few write longer reviews on Tripadvisor or Google, and some properties also run Trustpilot or Kiyoh. A lobby screen that shows two or three of these is more convincing than one big number from a single site.

This guide covers both halves: how to build and maintain a Booking.com score slide so it never shows an outdated number, and how to set up the live review widgets for your TV for Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, Yelp, Kiyoh and Google. There is a worked example for a small B&B further down with real slide timings and costs.

What works today to display Booking.com reviews on a TV screen

Each platform reaches the screen in a different way today. The table shows what you can put on your lobby TV this week.

If a platform has a live widget, use it, because a self-updating screen is one less thing to remember. Use a manual slide only for Booking.com, and only until native support arrives.

The Booking.com workaround: a score slide you update on a schedule

Your Booking.com score moves slowly. For most properties it shifts by a decimal point over weeks, so a slide refreshed once a month is accurate enough for a lobby. The work is about five minutes per update if you set it up right the first time.

Option 1: a Canva slide (the least effort)

This is the method we recommend for most properties. Design a 1920 × 1080 slide in Canva with your score, the number of reviews and a short line such as "Rated by our guests on Booking.com". Then share it with a public link and paste that link into TVpilot as a slide through the Canva integration.

The advantage is that edits made in Canva appear on screens automatically. When your score changes from 9.1 to 9.2 (example numbers), you open the design, change one text box, and the TV picks it up. No re-uploading, no Canva account connection. One caveat: multi-page Canva designs show only their first page, so keep the score on page one.

Option 2: a PDF or image

If you already make slides in PowerPoint, Keynote or another tool, export the score slide as a PDF or PNG and upload it. PDFs become one slide per page. When the score changes, use replace in place on the file so the playlist keeps its position and timing. Paid plans keep the newest five versions if you need to go back.

You can also build the slide in TVpilot's built-in Designer, which has text, shapes, QR codes and logo placement. That keeps everything in one dashboard.

Why not a screenshot from your phone?

A cropped phone screenshot of your Booking.com page looks blurry on a 50 or 55 inch TV, carries interface clutter, and the text is often too small to read from across a lobby. If you want the screenshot look, take it on a desktop browser at full width and crop it to 16:9. A clean typed slide still reads better.

Make the slide expire so a stale score never stays up

The real risk with a manual slide is forgetting it. If your score drops and the TV still shows the old, higher number, a guest checking their phone at reception will notice. Two settings prevent that:

• Per-slide expiry date: set the score slide to expire 30 days out. After that date it takes itself off screen, so the worst case is a missing slide, never a wrong one.
• Expiring content email alert: turn on the optional expiring-content email alert, and update the number when it lands in your inbox.

Also put the date on the slide itself ("Score as of 1 October"). It costs nothing and makes the number credible.

Live review widgets for the platforms that already support them

For Tripadvisor and Yelp, paste the link to your public business page. The screen shows your rating and your best reviews in one of three views:

• Rotating: one review at a time, large text. Best for a single lobby TV people walk past.
• Grid: several reviews at once. Better on a big screen in a breakfast room where guests sit for a while.
• Summary: the overall rating front and centre. Good as a short slide between other content.

Trustpilot works with just your domain, no account or API key, and adds two controls: a minimum rating filter (for example, only 4 and 5 star reviews) and your brand colours. Kiyoh connects with the connector hash from your own Kiyoh account and shows scores on Kiyoh's 10-point scale, which sits nicely next to a Booking.com score on the same scale.

If you want reviews to share the screen with other content, put a review widget into a Widget box in the Designer. A common layout is a welcome message and photo on the left with rotating Tripadvisor reviews on the right.

Worked example: a 14-room B&B with one breakfast-room TV

Say you run a 14-room B&B with a 50 inch TV in the breakfast room. Guests eat between 07:00 and 10:30 and sit for 20 to 30 minutes, so they will see the loop several times. You collect reviews on Booking.com and Tripadvisor and have a Google listing.

Hardware: a Fire TV Stick with the TVpilot app from the Amazon Appstore, or a Raspberry Pi 4 if you have one lying around. Either plugs into the TV's HDMI port.

Plan: the Free plan covers one screen with 250 MB of storage, which is plenty for a handful of slides. If you later add a second screen at reception, Starter is €5 per month for up to five screens.

The playlist:

The loop runs 82 seconds, so the Booking.com slide shows about 44 times an hour, and a guest sitting for 25 minutes sees it roughly 18 times. That is more than enough. If it feels repetitive, give the Tripadvisor widget longer, shorten the Google slide to 10 seconds, or use per-slide scheduling to keep the Google slide out of breakfast hours.

Maintenance: on the first of each month, open Booking.com, check your score, update the Canva text box and change the date. Then extend the slide's expiry by 30 days. Total time is about five minutes.

Use per-slide scheduling to show the breakfast slide only from 07:00 to 10:30 and swap in a check-out or local tips slide for the rest of the day.

Mistakes that make a review screen backfire

• Text too small: a review quote that reads fine on your laptop is unreadable from three metres. Keep quotes short and fonts large, or use the rotating view rather than grid on smaller TVs.
• Showing only perfect scores: a 4.5 with 300 reviews looks more real than a curated wall of five-star quotes. A minimum rating of 4 is a reasonable filter where it is available.
• Mixed scales without labels: Booking.com and Kiyoh score out of 10, Tripadvisor, Google and Yelp out of 5. Always label the platform on screen so a 4.6 is not read as a poor result next to a 9.1.
• Reviews as the whole loop: guests also want breakfast times, Wi-Fi details and the weather. Reviews work best as one or two slides among useful information.

When TVpilot is (and isn't) the right fit

TVpilot fits if you want live Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, Yelp, Kiyoh or Google reviews on a lobby or breakfast-room TV, plus a manually updated Booking.com slide, managed from a web dashboard. It is a good match for one to a few screens on cheap hardware, and plugins are included on every plan, including Free.

It is not the right fit if a live, automatically updating Booking.com feed is the only thing you need right now, because that widget is not available yet. It is also not for you if you require self-hosted or open-source software: TVpilot is hosted SaaS. And players need an internet connection to receive content updates, so a TV on a flaky guest network should get a better connection first.

Get your review screen running

A native Booking.com review widget is coming soon, so bookmark this page and check back. In the meantime, create your free TVpilot account, no credit card required, connect your breakfast-room or lobby TV, and have guest reviews on screen before tomorrow's breakfast.