Looking to invest in brand awareness and strategic growth in key markets? HTR now offers geo-targeted campaigns to your target regions a la carte or bundled into a discounted package to drive brand awareness and growth in strategic markets.
As we round the corner into the last month of the HotelTechAwards, we have increased the HT Score scheduler to run twice a day (typically runs only once a day).
This will provide participants more visibility into real time rankings day-to-day without having to wait a full 24-hours to see updated scoring.
NOTE ABOUT SUB-CATEGORY RANKINGS: Please note that given the amount of dynamic data, rich filters, content and multiple languages the category pages are extremely dense/heavy pages. As such, the page content is cached weekly in order to improve page load speed for users.
Verified Case Studies are a feature that enable hotel tech companies to quickly and easily build beautiful, engaging and trustworthy case studies that get promoted on Hotel Tech Report. Click here to learn more about creating verified case studies.
🎁 While case studies will require posting credits (10x for basic members, 5x for premium members) they are free for the next two weeks so go ahead and give it a try!
As with all new variables, verified case studies will start out as having a nominal impact on the HT Score in their first year at roll out and will increase in importance over time to ensure that all vendors have time to prepare for the update.
Verified case studies are incredibly important towards HTR's mission of delivering an unmatched hotel technology search and selection experience for hoteliers around the world. It's also the first step towards increasing benefits based selling throughout the site to help hoteliers visualize and imagine the possibilities of leveraging digital products by seeing real examples of their peers who are using them and the outcomes they are achieving instilling urgency, trust and FOMO to drive adoption of tech in the global hotel industry.
While case studies are a nominal part of the overall HT Score (<3%), they can be the determining factor in a close race where two companies have maxed out most other variables similar to how this can happen with Google's Search Algorithm. Here is an example of how this can happen:
If you notice your rank change in a category where you have close competitors in the rankings this can be easily resolved by just making sure that you at least have some verified case studies published for buyers.
Update: Check out the 2022 HITEC Orlando Innovation Showcase & Event Recap
If so, make sure to submit your innovation to get featured in HTR's HITEC recap innovation showcase (view example).
Submit your innovation to get featured
🚨Submissions deadline is June 15, 2022
💡 Please remember to carefully read the guidelines. Our team gets hundreds of submissions and it is critical for your submission to follow these guidelines in order to get included and featured in the article
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.
The annual 2022 HotelTechIndex and hotel tech ecosystem market map are now live. Special thanks to our sponsor Tripadvisor for supporting the creation of the most downloaded piece of content year after year on HTR.
📣 The report gets promoted:
BONUS: Check out HTR's guest post on Tripadvisor, How to Grow Your Hotel Business By Optimizing Your Tech Stack
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.
Up until now HTR has only offered hyper targeted category takeover sponsorship opportunities but with the rollout of the new site wide mega menu comes new ways to generate awareness, visibility and leads by sponsoring your relevant department.
The mega menu is based on high level departments and serves as the primary means of navigation throughout the site for 170k+ hoteliers each month. It is organized by department and showcases relevant categories, products and content with 3x key spotlight placements that one advertiser (per department) can be promoted via.
The exclusive advertiser of each department gets to own prime spotlight real estate throughout their department of choices' new mega menu including: (1) spotlight product (2) spotlight article (3) spotlight content download.
Departments currently available for spotlight placement include: Operations, Marketing, Revenue Management and Guest Experience.
Want to takeover the spotlight to put your brand front and center for relevant hoteliers researching tech solutions in your department?
Reach out over the live chat on site to inquire about availability and pricing.
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:
