Customers decide what your venue is before they ever see it.
They look you up, they look at the photos, they look at the rating, and by the time they arrive they have a picture in their head. If the room does not match the picture, the visit is already damaged, and the review they leave will be about the gap rather than about anything you actually did.
This is the cheapest problem in the industry to fix and one of the most common.
The gap is what generates the bad review, not the venue
I worked with a golf simulator business that was deliberately no-frills. Cheap, cheerful, affordable. There is a real market for that and there was nothing wrong with the offer.
The problem was the photography. Instead of shooting his own place he used stock images of far higher-end facilities with better technology. So people looked him up, saw something premium, booked, and walked into a bare concrete room with IKEA furniture and lighting that made everything look worse than it was.
The reviews were brutal, and almost none of them were about the golf.
We did two things. We made the facility better, which was mostly lighting, seating, and enough decor to make it feel like somebody worked there. Then we rebuilt the online presence around what the place actually was. Within weeks the rating started climbing.
Nothing about the core experience changed. What changed is that people knew what they were buying. The customers who wanted a premium simulator lounge went and paid premium prices somewhere else, which was the correct outcome for everyone. The customers who wanted cheap and fine got cheap and fine and were happy.
Chuck E. Cheese and Barcade sell the same thing
Strip both down and they are an arcade with food and drink. They are not remotely the same business, because they promise different nights out to different people.
Now imagine somebody in their thirties finds a venue online that presents like Barcade, brings three friends on a Friday, and gets seated in the middle of a seven-year-old's birthday party. The arcade cabinets are fine. The evening is not.
Your branding is a promise about what the room will feel like. Break it and the quality of the experience does not save you.
This industry cannot fake it, and that is an advantage
Open a food delivery app and half the feed is ghost kitchens operating under invented brands. There is a place near me called something like Chicken Chicken presenting itself as a small family operation with recipes passed down. It is a national pizza chain selling its regular wings under a different name. Nobody finds out, because nobody goes to the building.
Location-based entertainment does not have that option. Every customer comes through the door, which rules out the whole category of marketing that survives on nobody checking.
That sounds like a disadvantage. It is not. It means the venues that present themselves honestly compound goodwill instead of spending it, and it means your photographs and your content are the highest-leverage assets you own, because they are the promise.
What to actually do about it
Shoot your own space. Your own equipment, your own lighting, your own staff, your own customers. If the photos of your building look worse than the stock images you were tempted to use, that is not a photography problem, that is your building telling you something.
Then either fix the room or adjust the promise. Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is leaving the two pointing in different directions and letting your customers discover it in person.
Being accurate about what you are is how you attract the demographic that wants it, instead of collecting one-star reviews from people who were never going to like you.