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
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.
Earlier this morning HTR sent out the annual year in review notification email to all HotelTechAwards participants recapping your annual campaigns.
In order to send this email HTR exports data from the frozen database as of the 12/15 5pm awards deadline and maps the 27 merge fields and data points via Zapier to populate and send the automated notifications.
Shortly after sending the notification, we identified that one of the 27 fields was not mapped correctly and was fetching from the incorrect column which was the 'final score points value' (shown below).
Please note that this is the only of the 27 variables that was not mapped correctly and in no way impacts your ranking in the awards. The data to audit in the email is all of the inputs of the raw points score which were all correct (eg. reviews, integrations, partner reccs, employee survey completions, etc). That said, if you would like to receive your corrected/true final points score from the frozen database please reach out via the live chat on site.
We apologize for any confusion this may have caused and please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have.
HTR recently became aware of an edge case related to the mapping of country codes to regions that was introduced along with the deployment of the Poseidon Algorithm update that we are working on a patch for that will be deployed in the next couple of days (expected go live week of 11/22).
HTR typically pulls country data from the popular Google Places API (excluding mainland China reviews); however, a select group of countries and regions were found to be “unmatched” in the lookup function causing some vendors to experience artificially deflated country counts in their HTScore indexes.
Below is a list of countries that had anomalous entries in the database and were updated in the lookup function. One such example is that 517 reviews in the database were classified as originating in ‘Czechia’ while the HTScore algorithm lookup function was searching for the term “Czech Republic” as defined by the Google Places API.
Please note that only a fraction of cases were impacted by these mapping issues in these countries so just because a country is listed does not mean all reviews from that country were not mapped correctly.
List of impacted regions:
Most vendors will not notice any difference in their scores or the scores of other products in their categories. That said, vendors with reviews from the following countries MAY have been impacted; however, not necessarily as these were anomalies and in many cases the review countries were properly classified. Impacted vendors may have experienced an increase in countries and regions served which would in many cases increase HTScores from understated scores previously visible on the platform. These changes are extremely rare and likely unnoticeable but some vendors may notice a several point increase in scores as the algorithm begins detecting their accurate country and region counts once the mapping patch goes live.
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 |
Introducing, the all new redesigned lead inbox with a new clean design, enriched leads, premium member discounts, deal size calculations, a customizable metrics calculator and more.
Please note that if you have CRM forwarding turned on it will continue to work with the new form fields. If you have Zapier followup automation setup to map fields and automate followup, you can now add the new fields to your integration.
Dynamically calculate lead deal size calculations and company metrics like ROI and estimated revenue based on your company's internal metrics. Learn more about how lead metrics and calculations work
The 20% increases nearly doubles the previous discount amount available to members of 30% and is included for all members (on any plan) and doesn't require any plan upgrades or increases 🙌
It has been brought to our attention that there is an issue with the new translation feature on the review form and that we are working to resolve. Please note that this issue only appears to be impacting the review form and all other translated pages throughout the site are operational.
Related article: Buyer's guide sponsorship FAQs
The goal of the budget season buyer's guides is to create a living document that continues to evolve year over year becoming the ultimate primer for each category. HTR partners with one sponsor per category each year to be the exclusive sponsor of that year's budget season buyer's guide.
While the design and production of each buyers guide is handled by HTR, sponsors are featured prominently throughout the guide and on Hotel Tech Report for a full year through the following year budget season and additionally are able to contribute ideas, insights and content to infuse the guide with their unique expert perspective on the category.
*Underlined = sponsor involvement
Is Your Company a Premium Member with a Subsidiary and You Want to Unlock Membership Benefits for Your Subsidiary without Purchasing a New Membership at Full Price?
Premium Members can now receive discounted Premium Membership for their subsidiaries to access member features, benefits and exclusive discounts without having to purchase an entirely new membership for the separate company.
