Are you a basic member who is running review campaigns and you want to check if a specific customer left a review but you don't have access to the Automated Review Manager? Now you can lookup reviews in the new review lookup feature
Are you a basic member who is running review campaigns and you want to check if a specific customer left a review but you don't have access to the Automated Review Manager? Now you can lookup reviews in the new review lookup feature
Want to save a boatload of time updating old reviews to get fresh content on your profiles and boost your HT Score, rankings and visibility?
UPDATE (3/15/21): Please note that after surveying the community for feedback, pay-per-review will continue not to be permitted on HTR (details below)
HTR Vendor Community,
It has come to our attention that a handful of vendors were unaware of HTR’s policy not to allow direct incentive reviews on Hotel Tech Report so we wanted to reach out to all vendors and clarify HTR’s policies about incentivized reviews to make sure there is no confusion.
Since inception, HTR’s policies around incentivized reviews have remained the same which can be found in more detail via the help center. In summary, HTR’s perspective and stance on incentivized reviews to date has been:
Scenario | Explicit bias | Implicit bias | Policy | Infraction Level |
1) Randomized giveaway | No | No | ✅ Allowed | None |
2) Limited giveaway | No | No | ✅ Allowed | None |
3) Pay-per-review | No | Yes | ❌ Not allowed | Level I |
4) Pay-per-POSITIVE review | Yes | Yes | ❌ Not allowed | Level II |
There have been three separate occurrences of vendors in the community being reported for pay-per-review (scenario 3) which is a level 1 infraction but none-the-less, an infraction and against the rules of the HotelTechAwards. Since the inception of the annual HotelTechAwards four years ago, the rules have explicitly stated that direct pay-per-review is not permitted. The reported incidents were Level I infractions (scenario 3) and were not found to introduce explicit bias. Given that there have been several occurrences all claiming that the nuances of the permitted incentives were not clear--vendors identified will not be immediately disqualified from the competition however they will incur the following penalties:
UPDATE (3/15/22) After surveying the community (both hoteliers and vendors) we have concluded that HTR will not be changing review guidelines and will continue not to permit pay-per-review. While this is allowed on some review websites with disclosure, ultimately as a verticalized portal for the hotel industry the rankings and ratings are more critical to maintain accuracy and more importantly elimination of bias to ensure a fair platform that upholds the highest standards of integrity. Additionally, pay-per-review not only skews/biases consumer ratings, but it also gives larger companies with more resources an unfair advantage. As a result of these findings and feedback from the community, pay-per-review will continue not to be permitted on HTR under any circumstances as it always has been historically.
Vendors have shared 3 main reasons for the confusion around review compensation rules on the site: (a) HTR allows indirect incentives/giveaways (b) pay-per-review is permitted by other review websites and (c) pay-per-review is common in the B2B reviews space.
Despite these points, HTR’s current (and historical) policies don’t permit pay-per-review (only randomized giveaways). After discussing with hoteliers and vendors, we have found the consensus belief that pay-per-review should be permitted if certain conditions are met to disclose incentives to website visitors and hotel tech buyers.
The general governing body for online reviews and issues around consumer affairs is the FTC, which states the following:
In light of community feedback and FTC guidelines, HTR will amend our policies after the current year awards competition to allow for direct incentives when there is fair disclosure (effective January 15th, 2022). Disclosures will be incorporated into the hotel tech buyer user experience on the Hotel Tech Report platform. So how will this work?
Ultimately, incentives are a positive and encouraged mechanism to thank customers for their time, effort and expertise but all endorsements must reflect the honest opinions or experiences of the endorser (Source: FTC Endorsement Guides).
Therefore while HTR may (or may not) in the future expand its incentive guidelines to permit direct incentive reviews, these reviews would need to carry a clear designation to consumers about the nature of the incentive. Additionally, companies who have been in breach of this rule to date will receive penalties commensurate with their breach to ensure that (a) the behavior is immediately corrected and (b) reviews collected in this manner will not be counted towards the 2022 HotelTechAwards competition.
Previously the review form used to capture an overall rating and a likelihood to recommend rating. Since both were essentially two versions of an overall user rating they were duplicative which is why likelihood to recommend was (and always has) been the 'overall rating' factored into the HT Score to avoid duplicative counting of similar ratings.
In order to simplify the review form and show the more important variable front and center, the overall rating (/5) has been deprecated fully to reduce form fields and avoid capturing ratings that didn't count towards scoring and likelihood to recommend now shows in the UI in areas where the overall rating showed previously. Likelihood to recommend has always been the most important rating in the HT Score and therefore it is being moved front and center in the UI to better reflect its significance.
As a result, there are three areas you will see the likelihood to recommend rating surfaced as the focused variable:
Context: We have received several complaints from members of the community who believe that review syndication is allowing certain companies to collect reviews for lots of their products through review syndication and link pre-filling where in many cases hoteliers are selecting several products but in reality the review and content only pertain to a single product.
The Problem: The problem is that on the one hand, a hotelier who uses multiple products from a single vendor should be able to leave one review. On the other hand, this makes reviews less relevant and in some cases where >3 products are selected the user will only write relevant content for some of the products.
The Solution: Ultimately there are two sides to the argument and there is no right answer but rather its about balancing a seamless and easy experience for hoteliers to review products while also implementing constraints to maintain content relevancy. Therefore we have implemented two key changes:
These changes serve to make reviews more reliable, accurate, relevant and helpful for hoteliers.
This week we're rolling out several new features to the review manager to help streamline your workflows and make it easier to filter through large lists.
The archived tab used to be a place where you could send customers that you didn't want to send further communications to but it showed in the flow of the review manager which was a bit confusing because it meant a customer could have left a review, but they could also be in archived. Instead, we have deprecated 'archived' and rolled out 'unsubscribed'.
Previously when you selected a customer in the review manager the background would scroll to the top of the page making it difficult to find where you left off. Now, when you select a customer the background customer tile has a selected state to bookmark where you are visually and the page remains static so you can more easily keep your place. Improvements include:
When you've run dozens of campaigns and have thousands of customers in the review manager it can get really overwhelming and difficult to figure out how to filter the data to make sense in a way that is actionable, not anymore.
Previously the 'export suppression' list feature only exported (non-anonymous) customers that had left a review. Now, this export includes all (non-anonymous) customers from all tabs of your review manager along with the tab they're in (aka their status) so you can import this data to your CRM or other external tools.
While the review manager has always had in app messaging pop up with tips and tutorials and the help center has had best practices and templates, they now sit from and center in the campaign flow and review manager to make sure everyone on your team is able to optimize your campaign to follow best practices, save time and increase conversion.
With the rebuilt review manager and improved performance more companies have been sending more campaigns and larger campaigns. To ensure strong deliverability new daily sending limits have been implemented which include (1) 250 users/campaign (2) 500 requests sent/day
If its your first time sending a review campaign it might take you some brain racking to figure out what the heck to write to get users to leave reviews. The review manager now has new pre-written base STARTER templates to save you to time.
Its important to remember these are STARTER templates and are meant to serve as a starting point but you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD CUSTOMIZE AND MAKE THEM YOUR OWN. Remember, your goal is to follow all of the best practices but most importantly:
You can also check out more pre-written starter templates in the help center and
As a way to monitor review form conversion and make sure we capture as much content as possible in the event of a reviewer having an issue with the review form we capture partial review content.
This is solely for internal monitoring purposes as these reviews cannot be published since they are (a) incomplete and (b) lack verification and approval from the user (since they did not finish the form and submit their review).
Last week when we rolled out a performance improvement to the automated review manager some partial reviews appeared as 'pending' reviews.
This issue should now be resolved but please feel free to reach out with any questions or if you are still seeing a partial review in your vendor dashboard.
We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
Followup with users who have been sent review requests but never left a review all at once to save time.
Get unverified reviews verified faster with self-verifications. Premium members can now utilize a new type of verifications, self verification. Self verifications mean you have to reach out to hoteliers fewer times while getting more reviews approved and verified.
Pre-fill links to run targeted campaigns to users and pre-select the products they use to reduce fields and increase conversion.
⏯Pre-filling links (in the review manager)
⏯Pre-fill links (outside of the review manager)
Followup with users who didn't leave a review after campaigns are complete without going 1-by-1. Once users complete a campaign, then what? Instead of going one by one you can now bulk select and send a mass outreach template to lots of users at once.
Feature request shout out: Michelle @ HelloShift
Filter reviews by product to save time flipping between profiles. Save time flipping between profiles to read reviews and see which products each reviewer chose to review right from the review manager and filter your reviews by product to more easily find specific reviews.
Feature request shout out: Michelle @ HelloShift
Easily sort reviews by status to see when reviews are pending, which reviews you need to respond to or to hunt down rejected reviews and get them verified.
If you have tried pasting text into the custom templates in the automated review manager previously you may have noticed that the formatting carries over and can lead to inconsistencies if you don't reformat the styles from within the review manager. Now the templates feature will automatically strip out excess formatting to ensure consistency in your templates.
Feature request shout out: Marvin and Ari @ RoomPriceGenie
Preview your campaigns before you press send.
Members can now request an export of review data for internal analysis to share with product, customer success and marketing teams right from the review manager. (Note: Only company admins can access this feature). You can also download a suppression list right from the review manager.
👏 Feature request inspiration shout out: Saahil @ Oaky
We recently added a new templates library section to the help center that includes inspiration for copy/paste templates for your team to use and to add to the review manager to help you save time and increase conversion. Be sure to check out our latest high converting templates for collecting reviews during COVID times.