Along with the new year HTR is rolling out new and improved v4 Gold & Platinum Premium Membership plans that now include flexible HTR Agency credit that can be used towards advertising, sponsored content and demand generation campaigns.
What's New:
Head to the Membership Portal in the vendor dashboard to learn more and upgrade
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?
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.
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.
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.
Last year we rolled out subsidiary memberships for companies with multiple subsidiaries to be able to be able to purchase membership for multiple of their companies at discounted pricing for up to 3 companies.
Today we're rolling out a max spend cap on subsidiaries so that companies who purchase their primary base membership and additional discounted subsidiary Silver Memberships have a cap of 4 additional subsidiaries and any additional subsidiaries beyond 4 (plus the primary company's membership) get free Silver Membership included at no additional charge and still get all of the benefits of Silver Membership (view benefits).
Are you a company with 4 or more subsidiaries? Reach out via the live chat on site to get heavily discounted membership portfolio wide.
Here's how it works for all inclusive portfolio wide Silver Membership:
| Company | Membership | Pricing | Benefits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Company (base membership) | Silver Annual | Standard pricing | All |
| Subsidiary 1 | Silver Annual | 50% off | All |
| Subsidiary 2 | Silver Annual | 50% off | All |
| Subsidiary 3 | Silver Annual | 50% off | All |
| Additional Subsidiaries | Silver Annual | FREE | All |
