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
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.
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.
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.
