To kickoff 2025 we're launching a new AI assistant, Bell.ai.  Instead of hoteliers having to spend hours reading through reviews trying to synthesize information about each product, the AI assistant does this for them.

So what questions can Bell.ai help answer for hoteliers?

1. Summarize review and partner recommendations content 👉 What do customers and partners say about the product?
2. Run topical sentiment analysis 👉 What do customers think about key buyer consideration topics like pricing and usability?
3. Frequent mention analysis 👉 What do customers and partners most frequently mention across reviews?
4. Install base customer segmentation analysis 👉 What types of hotels typically use this product?
5. Review search 👉 What do users say about [x]?

1. Summarize review and partner recommendations content

2. Run topical sentiment analysis

The AI assistant automatically analyzes all review content for key topics including: user interface, product functionality, value, automation, customer support and integrations to output sentiment analysis along with summarization and citations by topic.

3. Frequent mention analysis

The AI assistant automatically analyzes hotelier reviews and partner recommendations to identify the most frequently mentioned topics by hoteliers and partners and outputs citations and summaries for each along with sentiment analysis.

4. Install base customer segmentation analysis

The AI assistant analyzes install base by property size, region, country, property type and product capabilities to help users understand what types of hotels typically use a given solution to help them determine fit for their own property. 

5. Review search

From within the AI assistant component on profiles, if hoteliers are looking for something specific they can search review content. 

Please be advised that on Tuesday December 3rd HTR had an issue with a production deployment that required us to roll back production to our last backup from the night before.  

• Impact: Low
• Scope: Some data that was contributed to the site on Wednesday 12/4
• Companies Affected: All companies who received any reviews, leads, or content on 12/4 impacted the same
• Resolution: We will be restoring all data lost from the couple of hours between the 12/3 backup through the 12/4 restoration
•  Targeted Completion: ✅ Resolved (Dec 12, 2024)

Doing so meant that production temporarily lost some data that was updated on the site on that day which is why you may notice the following things missing or in a different state than expected if they were posted, sent or updated on 12/4 after we restored the backup.

Most importantly, we have this data stored in a backup so rest assured it will not be lost and we are working diligently to manually restore it on production and appreciate your patience while we do so.  Please keep in mind that this is a very manual process that we have to manage carefully auditing and cross checking data and then carefully restoring the data for each table that could have been impacted so this is a slower process than we would like.

We are working as quickly and diligently as possible and hope to have all data that was updated on 12/4 that got wiped from production when we did the backup restoration and hope to have everything fully recovered by Wednesday Dec 11.

In the meantime, all site functionality and data submitted or updated before or after 12/4 is not impacted and we will keep this bug report post updated with the latest updates as we restore each data type that could have been impacted from the 12/3 backup: 

1. Review Campaigns (✅ Resolved): If you sent a review campaign on 12/4 then it may look in your review manager like the campaign didn't go out because the activity log events aren't present.  Our dev team is working to restore activity log events and campaign activity that once deployed will fully correct statuses and ensure that campaigns sent on 12/4 continue to run smoothly without impact  (Target restoration completion Friday Dec 6)
2. Reviews (✅ Resolved): Reviews that were submitted, verified, updated or moderated/published on 12/4 may have incorrect statuses or be missing all together.  Once review campaign activity is restored we will shift focus to restoring reviews  (Target restoration completion: EOD Monday December 9)
3. Partner Recommendations (✅ Resolved): Similar to hotelier reviews, partner reccs submitted, updated or published on 12/4 may be showing incorrect status or be missing all together (Target restoration completion: Tuesday Dec 10)
4. Case Studies (✅ Resolved): Case studies submitted on 12/4 may be missing from the site and will be restored (Target restoration completion: Weds Dec 11)
5. Integrations (✅ Resolved): Any integrations listed or verified on 12/4 may be missing or gotten unverified.  We will do our best to try to recover these but in the meantime if you believe an integration was verified and now it is not or its not listed feel free to re-add or re-verify the integration since they're easy to list and verify with the click of a button.
6. Posts (✅ Resolved): Any new press releases or guests posts submitted on 12/4 during the data restore period will be recovered.
7. Leads (✅ Resolved): Leads accepted on 12/4 may not be showing in the lead history ledger transaction table in the setting tab of your dashboard.  Additionally if you accepted a lead on 12/4 it may appear as unpurchased (since we restored db from 12/3) which means you may accept that same lead again.  Please note that we will review all transactions from 12/4 once data has been fully restored to ensure that there are no double charges.   If you accepted any leads on 12/4 we will contact your team to let you know that leads have been restored from this day and to confirm that there were no double charges so feel free to accept the lead again in the meantime (in the meantime you can check the ledger to confirm there is no double charge as well).
8. Miscellaneous: If there are any types of content that you believe your account had issues with please reach out to let us know.

We apologize for the inconvenience but want to reassure you that we are working diligently and will have any data that was lost from the couple hour window between the 12/3 backup and 12/4 restoration recovered in the next couple of days.

HotelTechReport's membership pricing will be increasing on January 1, 2025 with the rollout of new membership plans.  Please read the below notice for more info about the price increase.

This is the first membership price increase in more than four and a half years since HTR rolled out the current Premium 3.0 Membership plans back in April 2020 which are still available today.

Since rolling out Premium 3.0 in 2020, HTR's Membership pricing has remained flat despite making substantial investments to grow the value of membership by: (1) growing traffic from 39k monthly users to 200k+ (2) redesigning the entire platform from the ground up and (3) adding tons of new features for members (more detail below) all without a single price increase.  During these same four and a half years without a price increase, costs of doing business also increased dramatically (22.34% inflation since March 2020).

To account for increased cost of doing business and substantial ongoing investments made into the platform, HTR will be rolling out its first price increase.

1️⃣ Will existing members be impacted?

Existing members on annual membership plans will be grandfathered into current pricing for up to 2-years.

2️⃣ How can I get grandfathered into current pricing?

Legacy pricing plans will be available via the membership portal in the vendor dashboard through December 31, 2024.  All companies who upgrade prior to December 31, 2024 on an annual plan will be grandfathered into legacy pricing plans for up to 2-years.

3️⃣ What benefits do Premium Members get?

• Overview of Silver Membership Benefits
• Compare Plan Benefits, Details and Pricing via the Membership Portal
  
• Premium Member References & Testimonials

4️⃣ What new benefits have been added for members since the current Premium Membership 3.0 plans launched in April 2020?

In addition to growing traffic by more than 5x (39k monthly users > 200k+ monthly users) since rolling out Premium v3 back in April 2020, HTR has also rolled out tons of new features and benefits for members (without a single price increase).  Some of these include: 

1. Visibility and Leads 👉 Premium Members now generate more than 3x more profile views and leads

• Redesigned Lead Inbox with Lead Targeting and native CRM integrations to bolster lead engagement
• Lead booster to drive more visibility throughout thousands of pages and UI elements site-wide 
• New ways to generate visibility and leads via: redesigned department hubs, redesigned sub-category pages, PMS App Finders, Partner Integration Pages and the AI Tech Stack Advisor

2. Cost Savings 👉 Premium Members on average save more than $4,300/year on leads and ad campaigns

• Premium Members now get 50% off leads to save thousands of dollars every year (for most members this new benefit alone covers the entire cost of membership)
• Premium Members now save thousands of dollars on HTR Agency ad campaigns with members only discounted pricing

3. Branding 👉 Premium Members benefit from enhanced branding and AI powered features

• Enhanced branding and customization through Redesigned Premium Profiles with new functionality including: Product Level Branding, Feature Groups, Review Search, Native translations into 10 languages and more
• AI powered buyer analysis tools including: AI Enhanced Company Descriptions and AI Review and Expert Recommendation Summaries
• New ways to syndicate content to generate visibility including: Case Study Builder, Redesigned Report Pages and newsletter content syndication to 60k+ monthly hoteliers

4. Reputation and Rankings  👉 Premium Members have dozens of new features to save time by automating time consuming processes

• Features to automate time consuming review collection processes including: Review Campaign Automations, Bulk Review Updating
• Features to boost conversion on review campaigns to optimize reputation including: Gmail and Outlook Integrations, Team and Language Specific Templates and Branded Footer
• Features to more effectively monitor and optimize rankings including: Redesigned Reputation Report Card and Partner recommendations inbox
• Features to showcase reviews and boost conversion including: Native Review Social Sharing and Customizable website widgets library

5. Misc 👉 

• Enhanced dashboard experience via: Dashboard Redesign, Ledger system to track transactions and Membership Portal
• More ways to get promoted via newsletter, Outbound Campaigns and HotelTechInsider podcast promotion
• Premium Member Support Bot & Coaching Checklists to maximize membership ROI
• App Store API to infuse HTR's data into your own product

One of the most common requests that we've received from clients since launching the live PPC Auction is the ability to get a forecast of potential clicks and coaching tips to maximize click volumes so we've been hard at working building just that and are excited to roll out the new missed clicks forecast.  Click here to learn how to use the missed clicks forecast to optimize your ppc campaigns

Next month we're going to be rolling out several new features to the Review Manager and since we're in the middle of the HotelTechAwards we wanted to make sure to announce these a few weeks in advance so companies can plan accordingly if you'd like to utilize any of these new features in your awards campaign.

1. 💌 Send from your Gmail to boost conversion rates on campaigns
2. 📝 Shared team templates to save time and simplify collaboration
3. 🇪🇸 Language specific review links
4. 🎨 Customizable branded footer to boost conversion
5. 🏷️ Tag updates to simplify list organization

1. Send from your Gmail to boost conversion rates on campaigns

• Before: All campaigns and review requests were sent from an alias email address that wasn't recognizable to recipient
• After: Ability to run review campaigns that are sent from your own email address to boost conversion on campaigns

Please note that this will be a Premium feature will be available to Gold and Platinum Members

2. Shared team templates to save time and simplify collaboration

• Before: Each team member had their own templates that only they could utilize and if you wanted to run campaigns with different templates (ex. running campaigns in different languages) you'd have to keep updating them constantly for each campaign.
• After: Now teams will have a library of shared templates

3. Language specific review links

• Before: The dynamic {{review_link}} inserted into all campaigns defaulted to english and relied on user's browser to switch the language upon arrival for all other languages
• After: Now in the new template library you'll be able to set the language for your template and it will insert the respective language native review link

4. Customizable branded footer to boost conversion

• Before: Users would have to manually create a branded email footer in design software like Canva
• After: Now in the new custom footer tab you can easily customize a professional branded footer to boost conversion on campaigns.

Also...you can use the custom footer to send campaigns on behalf of another team member.

5. Tag updates to simplify list organization

• Before: When a user imported a list of customers a tag would be automatically generated with the date of the import and importers first name.  As companies began to run more campaigns this became overwhelming in the UI and made it extremely difficult to filter by tag in the review manager (especially since all tags were sorted by least recent first).
• After: All auto-generated tags will be removed to de-clutter the work space and simplify filtering and organization so only intentionally created tags will remain.  Additionally, the list of tags will be sorted by most recent first making it quick and easy to find your most recent and relevant tags.

In an effort to create consistency add depth to company descriptions for users (as well as save time for vendors having to write them), we've infused AI into company descriptions to automatically generate an in-depth description based on the following data sources:

• AI Generated Review Summaries (view example)
• AI Generated Partner Recommendation Summaries (view example)
• Company Description field in the profile editor (view example)

More Context About This Update

After surveying our audience of hotel tech buyers we found that most company descriptions generally had two major problems:

1. Too vague: They didn't tell users exactly what companies products do
2. Too much hyperbole: Most company descriptions were filled with filler words and hyperbole (i.e. words like revolutionary, etc.) that reduced user's trust in them

Given that feedback from users, we decided to build this feature leveraging AI to ingest information from your company's self-written description as well as other profile information like reviews and output a clear, consistent and to the point description using a series of LLM prompts.

Today we rolled out an update to HTR's hotels database and hotel lookup on the site where we migrated from Google Places as the core search to Tripadvisor.

TL;DR

• At the core of HTR is our hotels database
• Since inception, we have used Google Places as our hotel lookup to find hotels
• PROBLEM #1. The issue with Google Places as our core lookup is that its not specialized for hotels which meant that the database was able to have hotels that weren't even hotels (ie. users could select their city or any other type of location in Google) and Google often doesn't have the best hotel specific content
• PROBLEM #2. In order to launch HTR's upcoming AI Tech Stack Advisor tool we needed a stronger foundation of a hotel lookup that could accurately on-the-fly build a model of a hotel with key attributes like location, size, ADR, chain scale, amenities and hotel type while ensuring that the only results in the hotel lookup field were real and valid hotels
• New Hotel Lookup Component. As such, we rebuilt our entire hotels db and hotel lookup throughout the site with a new component built on a foundation of Tripadvisor's API with custom logic and mappings for things like keywords, attributes and guest type to further enrich and segment the database and ensure accurate hotel lookup and model building in real time on-the-fly
• Historical Data Migration. A major undertaking in this project was to run the old hotels database of 100k+ hotels through the new hotel lookup component to verify, validate, enrich and de-dupe hotels which impacts historical data in the database 

How will this impact my company?

Migrating historical data is a massive undertaking and will be rolled out over the next several weeks gradually updating ~5,000-10,000 hotels per day.  During this time you will likely notice some changes to the flags on reviews on your profile as existing/legacy hotels in the database get mapped to Tripadvisor hotels and then enriched via the new hotel lookup.  If you have any concerns or see any data that you believe to be inaccurate please let us know.

As we all know, there is no one best overall solution for all hotels in any category but rather there are better solutions (and worse solutions) for each individual hotel based on key attributes and buyer preferences.  

For this reason, HTR has been taking steps to continuously serve personalized results to users beginning with segment based rankings and Site Personalization is the next step in the evolution of providing a personalized buyer experience to each user as they browse the site based on attributes like their hotel size, location, PMS and more.

TL;DR

• HTR automatically identifies each hotelier's location based on IP address and stores this info via the new personalization settings which can be found on each category page (see below)
• Hoteliers can then add to their personalization settings additional info like their property size and PMS to further personalize their results
• Each hotelier's personalization attributes get saved and not only do the recommendations on the page they're on get personalized--but these settings get stored globally site wide so anywhere the user goes on the site they will automatically have results personalized to them
• Vendors can generate more (and better fit) leads by (a) improving segment based rankings and (b) configuring Lead Targeting settings (aka. Tell the HTR App what types of leads are best fit for you that you want to connect with)

Issues We Heard From Hoteliers

1. "It's tedious to continue applying the same filters on each new page"
2. "The default recommendations show vendors that sometimes don't even service my region"
3. "I reached out to a vendor that for a price quote or demo but they told me they don't service my region"

Issues We Heard From Vendors

1. "We're getting leads from regions that we don't service.  We don't want to ignore these requests but we also don't want to accept them because we don't service the region"

How This Feature Solves These Problems

The default sort is now set to personalization so that results show more relevant matches for users which not only takes segment based reputation into account but it also prioritizes vendors who are actively connecting with similar hotels  to improve the hotelier experience by reducing no response rates by increasing the probability that hoteliers reach out to vendors who are actively connecting with hotels in their region.

Tip to Generate More Leads from Your Target Segments

When you are logged into your vendor account you can now see your Lead Targeting Settings on category pages, make sure your Lead Targeting Settings match the types of leads that you want to connect with to generate more (and better fit) leads.

Users can now easily search reviews to quickly find specific content or data points that they are most interested in.