How to improve a restaurant rating on GrabFood and GoFood after bad reviews
There are three ways to bring a restaurant rating back up after bad reviews, and they produce very different results.
The fastest is to appeal the unfair scores: around 80% of the appeals we file with Grab end with the review removed. The most important is to remove the causes of one-stars: most often packaging and temperature, not the kitchen. The most underrated is to intercept a complaint before it becomes a score in the app.
And the most popular one — collecting new five-stars and hoping they outweigh the rest — works slowest of all. The rating is an arithmetic mean across the whole period, and one one-star costs twenty five-stars.
Below is the same order we follow when raising the rating on restaurant accounts in Bali and Phuket.
Why one one-star costs twenty five-stars
The platform rating is an arithmetic mean of every score across the whole period. Not a month, not a rolling window. All of it. Do the maths yourself: one one-star plus twenty five-stars is 101 points across 21 scores, which is 4.81. Twenty flawless orders to undo one bad one. That is why "we will collect good reviews and they will outweigh it" almost never works: you have to outweigh twentyfold.
4.8 is the mark we take every account to: from there the algorithm serves impressions noticeably more willingly, and a customer choosing between two listings looks at the number next to the name before anything else.
And one more detail that makes the picture harsher. We looked at a sample of 432 reviews over 30 days: 51% five-stars, 28% one-stars and only 3% fours. Delivery scores are bimodal — people write a review either when everything was great or when everything went wrong. Nobody gives a "four minus" for a forgotten sauce. They give a one.
Step 1. Do not earn the negatives
First and foremost: quality and assembly errors. Not "review management" but the thing reviews come from. Our medians across 96 restaurants in Bali and Phuket, January–August 2026:
| Fleet median | 1 bad review per 138 orders |
| Grab average | 1 per 180 |
| Best on Grab | 1 per 575 |
| GoFood average | 1 per 139 |
| Best on GoFood | 1 per 236 |
If you get a negative more often than one per hundred orders, the problem is almost always packaging or temperature, not the kitchen. Food that was flawless at handover arrives cold or spilled — and collects a one-star aimed at a kitchen that did nothing wrong. It is the most common cause and the one owners take longest to find, because they look for it in the food.
Three things account for nearly all of it:
An order waiting for the courier goes cold before it even leaves.
A missing item or sauce is a one-star, not a four. See the score distribution above.
Twenty minutes on a scooter in thirty-degree heat is not the same as carrying a plate to a table.
Step 2. Intercept the complaint before it becomes a score
Mistakes happen even in a well-run restaurant. The difference between a 4.5 restaurant and a 4.8 one is often not the number of mistakes but where the unhappy customer goes: into the app to leave a one-star, or into your WhatsApp.
This is our own development and it looks simpler than it works. A business card is attached to the order bag. A card, not a flyer — and that distinction is the whole point. A flyer reads as advertising and gets binned unread. A card reads as a contact: its first meaning to anyone is "you can write here".
Three phrases on it, in large type:
+ a large QR code leading straight to the restaurant’s WhatsApp
Why these three. We read more than two thousand reviews on Grab and Gojek and wrote down the words people actually use to state a complaint. These three are the most quoted. They are also the three mistakes the team makes most often during assembly.
Someone who opens the bag and sees the wrong thing reads their own thought on the card, already worded for them, with a way to say it right now sitting next to it. That takes less effort than opening the app and leaving a score.
From there the arithmetic at the top of this page takes over. One intercepted complaint is not "a one-star saved". It is twenty five-stars you will not have to earn. And there is a second effect: a complaint in WhatsApp is a chance to fix the order and keep the customer. A one-star in the app is the end of the conversation.
Step 3. Remove what should never have appeared
An unfair review can be contested, and it works more often than people assume. Around 80% of the appeals we have filed with Grab end with the review removed. There are two conditions and both are mandatory.
The fresher the order, the more data the platform still has on it and the higher the chance.
"The customer is wrong" is not an appeal. An appeal is the acceptance time, the prep time, the order contents, the packaging photo, the courier chat. Things that can be verified.
An appeal is the only tool that removes a score from the history instead of diluting it. That is why it produces a result faster than anything else: removing one one-star is the same as earning twenty five-stars, except it takes a day.
How to tell it is working
Stop treating the rating as your main indicator. It averages the entire history and therefore reacts months late. Watch a different number: how many orders pass between two negative reviews. That one reacts to what is happening this week, and it is the first place where steps 1 and 2 show up. The medians to compare against are in the table above.
What you must not do
On the same marketplaces where you hire a contractor, reviews and ratings are sold right next door — from Rp 99,000. The buyer is usually not the owner but the hired person, who does not know how this ends.
Grab and Gojek track fake reviews systematically: they see the device, the account and the speed at which scores appear. A restaurant owner came to us having received a second and final warning from Grab for fake reviews — they had been posted from one and the same account, the crudest scheme there is. The step after a final warning is not a ranking penalty and not review removal: it is a closed merchant account, together with the whole order history, the rating and the position the restaurant spent months earning.
The case in full — in the breakdown of non-specialist contractors.
The difference is simple. After an appeal you have one unfair review less. After fake reviews you have one warning more.
What it looks like in practice
USSR Phuket — from 4.5 to 4.8. Zaytun Ubud — from 4.67 to 4.8. In both cases this was not review management but work on the causes: availability, speed, order accuracy, complaint interception and appeals against unfair scores.
Who does this
Appeals have to be filed fast, which means someone reads the new reviews every day, not once a month. The causes of one-stars get traced through specific orders, not impressions. The cards have to be on the packaging every day and the WhatsApp messages have to be answered. This is daily work, and that is exactly why it usually does not happen.
There are four options: the owner, an in-house manager, a freelancer or an agency. We broke the difference down separately — who should run GrabFood and GoFood. If the rating did not drop on its own but together with the orders, it is not where to start: few orders — where to start looking for the cause.
We are Delivery Booster, the agency that runs delivery for restaurants in Bali and Phuket. The numbers above come from our clients’ dashboards and our benchmark across 96 restaurants, not from illustrations.
Frequently asked
How many good reviews does it take to cancel out one bad one?
Twenty five-stars for one one-star to reach 4.8. The rating is an arithmetic mean across the whole period, so the maths is direct and checkable: one one-star plus twenty five-stars is 101 points across 21 scores, which is 4.81.
How soon will the rating move?
It depends on how many scores you already have. The longer the history, the bigger the accumulated mass and the slower the average moves. That is why appeals work faster than anything else: they remove a score from the calculation instead of outweighing it.
Should I reply to bad reviews?
Yes, but not for the rating. A reply is seen by people who read reviews before ordering and it affects their decision. It does not affect the number itself at all.
What if the one-stars are fair?
Then an appeal will not help, and that is fine. A fair one-star is information about what exactly broke in assembly, packaging or speed. The restaurant with one bad review per 575 orders did not get there by contesting everything.
Can I wipe the old reviews and start the account over?
No. An account with a wiped history is shown by the algorithm as new, and a new restaurant has nothing to show. You would lose not only the bad scores but the whole accumulated position.
Keep reading
Two ways to go from here
Both work. The first costs nothing and does not require us.
The method and the norms — open and free
The five stages we run on every account, published in full. Alongside them, market norms from 96 restaurants so you have something to compare your numbers against.
An audit of your listing
Paste your restaurant’s Grab link and the report comes back in a couple of minutes: menu and search, photo coverage, reviews, prices against the neighbours. Free, no strings; after that it is 10% of delivery revenue with no upfront payment.
Diagnose my listingor message us directly →