With audience growth continuing to pick up globally HTR has recently rolled out native translated versions of the site in 6 new languages including: Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew 🙌
Want to add HTR product ratings to enrich the experience for your user's in your app store, integrations page or marketplace?
The App Store API gives forward thinking media partners, app stores, marketplace facilitators and service providers API access to HTR's data set allowing approved partners to easily enrich their product with HTR ratings and reviews to add helpful context for users and bring your app stores to life.
One of the biggest pain points hoteliers have when selecting software is being inundated with a laundry list of features that aren't standardized and take time and effort to organize, prioritize and figure out which ones they care about and need and compare vendors.
Today, we're rolling out the new feature groups feature (no pun intended) to make it easier than ever for hoteliers to understand, visualize and compare the core capabilities of products to quickly understand the most important aspects to focus on.
Related Update: Introducing Product Modules
If you've ever thought to yourself, "Hmmm...wouldn't it be nice to be able to customize the social share image for my press releases on HTR?"
If so, you can thank Gary and Ruth from Duetto and Assil from Userguest for the feature request.
Related Article: How to Post a Press Release
UPDATE: This change went live on May 6, 2022 Learn more
Historically the way HTR has been structured is that in order to become discoverable in a category and generate leads, you needed to have a product listing/dedicated profile in that category
If the product could be purchased as a standalone product then you would list is as such, and if it was a module/add-on for another core product--then you would list it as an add-on profile.
The problem with this is that in many cases it doesn't make sense to have to create (and manage) an entirely new profile for add-ons since in reality, many times these are just modules with premium capabilities and functionality of another core product suite.
That's why as of next month, HTR will be transitioning from add-ons -> Modules, here's how it works...
If you currently have add-on profiles your reviews will be migrated to the core product and your modules will be created automatically so there is nothing that you need to do, it will all be handled for you.
Today we rolled out a redesign to the main site navigation on HTR to bring more content front and center and help users quickly find their way to relevant information.
The site wide navigation is the main way that users navigate HTR and now the new design creates focused department based hubs of categories, products and content front end center throughout the user experience.
Along with the new site-wide navigation comes a redesigned vendor tool bar to replace the old design.
The new sub-category pages signal a shift in perspective where there is no longer an emphasis on a 'one size fits all' approach.
Instead the UX of the site is built around buyer persona segmentation and filtering tools to help buyers find the best fit for them based on their property/ies characteristics including: hotel size, property type, location and even PMS.
By putting the power in the hands of users to find their perfect fit based on data in the platform with similar property characteristics to theirs, there is no longer an attempt to make a one size fits all recommendations and as such--the default sort is no longer entirely rankings based (until a user applies their property attribute filters) and now serves as a way for Premium Members to gain added visibility on the site.
The default sort gives all members (any plan/tier) preferred placement and boosted visibility via the default sort and then sorts by HT Score.
These new placements in the default sort are just one more way, beyond the already existing boosted visibility placements, to give members even more visibility and benefits to drive more leads.
Members will also now receive preferred priority visibility via collections product tiles in organic content produced by HTR (or guest posts submitted by our contributor network) that relate to your category or categories to drive you even more visibility in high intent content to make sure that your brand and products surface as many times as possible throughout the buying journey for your related topics and categories on the site. View example contributor post with related member inclusion.
By supporting the HTR platform as members you share in our vision and enable us to continue to develop educational content, tools and campaigns that strive towards our mission of empowering hoteliers to leverage their greatest asset, technology. Together we help raise awareness that great technology is essential to staying competitive and running a modern hospitality business.
While we are a community and an industry organization of sorts, we are also a marketing platform and place strong emphasis on performance and value for our members which is why membership is priced to ensure that if our members get even just a single lead each year that they wouldn't have otherwise, it will not only justify their investment but it will guarantee a positive ROI with additional leads, awareness and benefits all generating exponential ROI making sure that HTR is your marketing team's best investment.
With this change, users still have the opportunity to sort and filter by key attributes including the HT Score--but this default sort aims to add even more value and visibility for members at no additional cost to generate an even stronger ROI out of your membership.
As of this week we're rolling out redesigned sub-category pages. These pages will serve as hubs for relevant content about each sub-category with new filters to help users move beyond a single top solution recommendation and instead help users identify the solution that is right for them.
Key changes:
There is no best overall vendor in any given category nor has there ever been just as there is no single best hotel asset. But to make comparisons amongst hotels asset managers and buyers use metrics like REVPAR and similarly HTR uses the HT Score.
The reason for this is that popularity is not a strong indicator of fit (or it would just be a bigger is better competition). Having said that, popularity does tend to be a strong indicator of fit when applying segmentation (ie. most popular for resorts, most popular in Europe, etc). For example, an mobile ordering solution that is recommended by lots of resorts is more likely to be a good fit for a resort looking for mobile ordering than a vendor who is not recommended by other resorts.
For this reason we have created the new buyer personas that outline hotel types that tend to have unique attributes which lead them to make similar tech purchasing decisions.
At a glance users can now quickly see that there is no one size fits all solution but rather there are different tools that serve different types of properties with unique need.
The new data filters enable HTR to move beyond a single overall ranking and instead allow users to quickly refine the rankings based on their own criteria including hotel size, city, region, hotel type or even PMS.
The new category pages are jam packed with helpful resources for buyers giving them tons of free tools, resources and content all related to the category they are researching including:
We're excited to share that the Hospitality for Peace initiative is now live! (view press release)
We've already raised $52,500 from fellow hotel tech companies to provide much needed humanitarian relief in Ukraine.
CURRENT FUNDING UP TO $393,227! track progress live
On top of that, corporate partners have committed to matching an additional $280,000 when the campaign reaches $100k (view corporate partners)
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." ~ Hellen Keller
Needless to say, we're stronger and can make more of an impact when we work together as a community--and that's where you come in...
To make it even easier for you to help spread the word and make an impact, we created copy/paste email templates and graphics for you to use.
We appreciate any support you and your team can provide to help maximize our impact as a community!
Over the past 2 weeks we've been brainstorming ways to provide support to those impacted by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
Our first thought was to make a donation as quickly as possible to a cause that has boots on the ground--so we made a $25,000 donation to World Central Kitchen (WCK).
We've also had a few members of the community reach out asking if we're organizing any community wide initiatives so...we got to work and the Hospitality for Peace Ukraine Relief Campaign was born.
A few reasons we decided to launch this campaign:
Together with our first few corporate partners, the campaign already has over $250,000 committed to support the relief efforts so please reach out via the live chat if your company is interested in joining the initiative and supporting the campaign.
Even if your company isn't able to make a donation or become a match partner, there are still ways to help by spreading the word when the campaign goes live to help us reach our goal of raising $100k from the community (which will unlock the full corporate sponsor match donations).
We know it's a quick turnaround but given the urgency of the situation we're going to be acting quickly and kicking off the campaign next week so please reach out if your company is interested in joining as a match partner, donor or promoter.
