Sisyphus and the Review Queue

A boulder, a hill, and an inbox full of reviews

Every hotel manager, restaurant owner and short-term rental host knows the feeling. You answer every review on Sunday night. By Tuesday there are new ones. By Friday you are behind again. Nothing about the task is hard. What wears you down is that it never ends.

The Greeks had a word for work like that. They told a story about it, and the word is Sisyphean.

Who was Sisyphus?

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra, the city later known as Corinth, and he was famous for his cunning. In the best-known tellings he outwitted the gods more than once. He gave away one of Zeus's secrets. He chained up Thanatos, the personification of Death, so that for a time no one could die. And when he did die, he talked his way back out of the underworld.

The gods answered with a punishment designed to be perfectly pointless. In the underworld, Sisyphus must push an enormous boulder up a steep hill. Each time he gets close to the top, the boulder rolls back down, and he has to start again. Forever. Homer describes the scene in Book 11 of the Odyssey, and ever since, Sisyphean has meant a task that is endless and apparently futile.

Why customer reviews feel Sisyphean

Online reviews are not a punishment, but the way they arrive has the same shape as the myth.

• The boulder keeps coming. New reviews land every day on Google, TripAdvisor, Booking, Expedia, Yelp and more. Each platform has its own inbox and its own rules.
• There is no finish line. A review queue is never complete. It is only caught up until the next review arrives.
• It is important but never urgent. A guest at the front desk or a table waiting for the check will always beat a review from three days ago. So the review loses, every time, until the backlog is embarrassing.
• Progress is invisible. A queue cleared on time looks exactly like a queue nobody touched, right up to the moment it slips. No one applauds a reply posted within a day.

It is not only a hotel problem

The same pattern shows up wherever a business serves the public: restaurants and cafes, clinics and dental practices, salons and gyms, car dealerships, retailers, tour operators, short-term rentals. Customer reviews are public, permanent and read by the next customer deciding where to go. The more volume a business has, the heavier the rock.

We started with independent hotels, where the stakes are high and the volume is steady. But the pattern is universal: anywhere there are customer reviews, there is a queue.

Where the myth stops matching: the work is not futile

Here is the important difference. Sisyphus's labor is pointless by design. Answering reviews is not. Prospective customers read the replies. A thoughtful response shows that someone is paying attention. And the reviews themselves, read together, tell you what to fix: the slow valet, the noisy air conditioner, the server every guest mentions by name.

The philosopher Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, argued that Sisyphus can find meaning in the struggle itself and that we should imagine him happy. It is a beautiful idea for a philosopher. It is a poor operating model for a general manager. Nobody should have to find peace in clearing a review queue on a Sunday night.

So the answer is not to stop answering reviews. It is to stop pushing the rock the way Sisyphus did: alone, by hand, with no end in sight.

How to stop pushing the rock alone

1. Define "caught up." Pick a clear response target, such as every review answered within 24 hours, so the queue has a finish line.
2. Write down your voice and your facts once. A short brand voice guide plus a fact sheet (amenities, policies, staff names) lets every reply be specific and accurate instead of copy-and-paste.
3. Triage by risk. Routine praise can follow the guide. Low scores, legal issues, safety concerns and anything involving compensation should reach a decision-maker before a reply goes live.
4. Read for patterns, not just replies. Three mentions of the same problem in a week is operations data. Pull it out and put it in front of the person who can act on it.
5. Hand the repetitive part to someone whose job it is. That is what we do at WeHandleReviews: AI-assisted, human-supervised replies within 24 hours, plus a one-page weekly brief that tells your GM what guests loved and what needs attention.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Homer, Odyssey, Book 11 (the description of Sisyphus in the underworld).
• Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Gallimard, 1942), published in English as The Myth of Sisyphus.