What's New
As such, we have decided to deprecate this as a department from the site beginning early January 2024.
Each sub-category was assessed individually to determine the best approach for how to handle. Here are the final conclusions:
one such category which was the Marketplaces & Integrators category which had several issues that lead to its deprecation from the site beginning in 2024. The core issues with the category were:
If you are one of the 27 companies that had a product listing in the Marketplaces & Integrators category, two things happened when your profile was deprecated along with the category to preserve your content:
A couple things to note:
As in past year's all companies who compete in the annual HotelTechAwards get free access to the Automated Review Manager for 30-days (September 1 - September 30) to kick start your campaign. This year we are also going to be adding a new perk worth thousands of dollars which is that all participants will now get 10x free case studies ($5,000 value) to utilize during the month of October. We will be sending out a reminder notification about this in October but for those of you who like to plan ahead...plan on focusing on posting case studies in October. How it works:
Reminder: For companies who are looking to compete in the overall platform awards, please rememeber that you do not need to register seperately for this competition BUT YOU DO NEED TO BE REGISTERED AND COMPETING IN EACH OF YOUR RESPECTIVE PRODUCT CATEGORIES.
]]>Over the past several years HTR rolled out new variables including Partner Recommendations, Case Studies, Profile Completeness and the Trending Score which have to date been static (aka. cumulative over time) meaning that for example a partner recommendation or case study created today was viewed no differently that one left 5-years ago. As such, HTR is going to be implementing the same decay factor that the category review threshold received back in 2021 to each of these variables in August '23 to make them more relevant and dynamic.
Companies who have been idle on HTR without recent hotelier or partner recommendations, information requests, press mentions, etc.
Make sure that your company has not been idle for more than 6-months on HTR with no recent content (ie. hotelier reviews, partner recommendations, case studies, lead requests, press releases, etc). Please check your Reputation Report Card for more specific instructions and priorities for your company.
Over the past several years not only has the algorithm become more complex, but simultaneously we have seen tons more products get listed on the site along with substantial growth in the content and data that the algorithm analyzes (ie. reviews, partner recommendations, integrations, etc).
As the HotelTechReport platform and data set has grown, computing the HT Score has become significantly more resource intensive to the point where it has begun impacting application performance.
In order to increase app performance for Premium Members and site speed for hoteliers-- beginning on July 19, 2023 HotelTechReport will stop calculating an HTScore for products that do not have a trustworthy profile (aka. < than 25 cumulative all-time reviews) as a way to reduce the computational capacity required to run the HT Score. Products without a trustworthy profile don't have sufficient feedback on the platform for the algorithm to effectively rank them so this was a natural fit to reduce the scope of the dataset that the HT Score analyzes.
After the update goes live, any product with <25 reviews will show "unranked" on their profiles and default sort after ranked vendors by # of reviews across the site. As soon as vendors achieve 25 reviews, they will receive a rank within 24-hours.
The purpose of this update is to help improve application performance and site speed as well as help hoteliers avoid viewing products as ranked that realistically don't have a trustworthy profile or sufficient data to be ranked effectively by the algorithm. Products that don't have a trustworthy profile with at least 25-reviews will be clearly marked as 'unranked' so buyers know that there is not sufficient feedback to rank the product based on user feedback from hoteliers in the community.
Just make sure you don't have any products with fewer than 25 verified reviews on the platform to make sure all of your product profiles are above the trustworthy profile threshold.
Need help collecting reviews quickly?
Each product on HTR is analyzed based on real time data in the platform along these four criteria to determine it's trending score within it's category to show which products are trending most in a given month.
]]>Ultimately profiles are only as valuable to users as the content that your team inputs which is why we are implementing this new variable to ensure that companies have added all of the content that buyers need to learn about each product to make more informed decisions.
The profile completeness score will evaluate each profile along with pieces of key information that buyers look for which include:
While we've tested the new infrastructure extensively in a staging environment, given the scope of the project it is inevitable for small issues and edge cases to arise which we'll be logging here to keep clients up to date.
Please let us know if you run into any issues that are not logged below so we can work to reproduce and resolve them as quickly as possible.
🙏 We appreciate your patience and understanding and hope to have all issues resolved by Friday June 2nd
Reported | Issue | Impact | Status |
5/30 | Some leads missing location | Limited, only a handful of leads | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Unable to decline lead | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Server error on profile | Limited, small sub-set of users impacted that did not have a last name on their user account | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Error message trying to save Instant Connect settings | Limited, edge case for specific user | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Search page not loading results | All users | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Unable to send review update requests | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
5/30 | Review social share not working | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
6/1 | Issue trying to add new capability in profile editor | Limited, small sub-set of vendors who listed new products in the last 24-hours | ✅ Resolved |
6/5 | Issue trying to add a new integration | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
6/5 | Embeddable website widgets stopped working | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
6/8 | Legacy widget showing 0 reviews | All vendors | ✅ Resolved |
6/12 | Lead forms not working | Most users | ✅ Resolved |
6/14 | Validation issue on press release submission form location field | Small subset of vendors | 🛠 In progress |
Is your company launching any cool new products or features at HITEC Toronto or The Hospitality Show this year? If so, apply to get featured in HTR's 2023 HITEC Innovation Recap.
Hotel Tech Report's last HITEC Highlights article had more than 5,000+ reads so it's a great way to get the word out about the products or features that your team has been working so hard to build and bring to market.
Submit your innovation to get featured
The submission deadline is June 9th, 2023
UPDATE (6/27/23): Article is now live 2023 HITEC/THS Report: 70+ Hospitality Technology Innovations You Need to Know and eblast to 50k+ hoteliers scheduled for Friday June 30th @ 6am PST
P.S. If you'll be at The Hospitality Show in Vegas that week instead of HITEC (like us), we'll be hosting a panel on A.I. in Hospitality Thursday so come by and chat after the panel or reach out to schedule a meeting. Other speakers at THS include Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano, Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian, Sonesta CEO John Murray, Accor CTO Floor Bleeker and more.
Before | After | |
X-Small | 1-9 rooms | no change |
Small | 10-24 rooms | no change |
Medium | 25-99 rooms | 25-74 rooms |
Large | 100-199 rooms | 75-199 rooms |
X-Large | 500+ rooms | 200+ rooms |
After lots of feedback from companies in the HTR ecosystem wanting to have a way to more effectively showcase their entire suite of products and capabilities (rather than each individual product/point solutions), the April 2023 profile redesign brings company-level information, content and data into product profiles to showcase a more holistic view of vendor capabilities while still maintaining product/category specific content and reviews.
We've created a checklist of 8 things to prepare in advance of the new profile design rolling out in April that takes 15 minutes and will make sure your profiles are optimized for the new design.
Basic Profilesℹ | Premium Profilesℹ | |
Fully Re-designed Profiles ℹ | ✅ | ✅ |
Modules Showcase ℹ | ✅ | ✅ |
Native Social Sharing for Reviews ℹ | ✅ | ✅ |
Benefits & Use Cases ℹ | ✅ | ✅ |
Enhanced Image Clarity | ✅ | ✅ |
Vendor Responsiveness Spotlight ℹ | ✅ | ✅ |
Company Profiles | ✅ | |
Branded Profile Header Banner | 🔒 Premium only | ✅ |
Remove Ads & Competitors ℹ | 🔒 Premium only | ✅ |
Boosted Visibility & Leadsℹ | 🔒 Premium only | ✅ |
Branded Images ℹ | ✅ | |
Products Showcase ℹ | ✅ | |
Notable Clients Spotlight ℹ | ✅ | |
Simplified multi-profile management | ✅ |
Want to learn more about all of the features, benefits & exclusive discounts that come with Premium Membership to drive you more visibility and leads year-round on HTR?
What's New:
Head to the Membership Portal in the vendor dashboard to learn more and upgrade
🎁 Members will be able to use posting credits included with your membership to create case studies and for non-members/basic members case studies will require the same amount of posting credits as a guest post but for the next two weeks so go ahead and give it a try!
]]>Lead Instant Connect is a feature that allows you to set criteria for the types of leads that you want to target so that they'll get instantly accepted and forwarded into your CRM for immediate follow-up without delays or the need to manually check the dashboard. Click here to learn more about Instant Connect.
Since Instant Connect facilitates a better marketplace experience for hoteliers, ultimately the entire marketplace will shift fully to this model. That said, we're going to be rolling this out slowly to give vendors a chance to migrate over to the new system and optimize your lead targeting criteria. Additionally, vendors who accept leads via Instant Connect will receive increasing incentives over the first 6-months post-launch as a reward for delivering better, more responsive service to hoteliers placing requests through the platform. Below are the scheduled incremental increases in the discount amount for Instant Connect leads:
While auto-reload is an optional feature, if you choose not to enable it you do so knowing that it comes with the following risks:
Beginning September 1st, 2022 we are implementing two additional benefits for all leads accepted via Instant Connect that vendors can earn to align incentives and ensure that you are delivering responsive service to hoteliers and make sure that you're set up for success which include:
Over the past several months we have received complaints from hoteliers who place info requests on Hotel Tech Report that vendors take too long to reply which is why we built the Instant Connect feature to dramatically reduce time-to-followup and improve both the user experience for hoteliers as well as the vendor experience (time-to-followup is directly correlated with lead success rated).
Instant Connect facilitates a better marketplace experience for hoteliers, ultimately the entire marketplace will shift fully to this model. That said, we're going to be rolling this out slowly to give vendors a chance to migrate over to the new system and optimize your lead targeting criteria.
Vendors who accept leads via Instant Connect will receive increasing incentives over the first 6-months post-launch as a reward for delivering better, more responsive service to hoteliers placing requests through the platform. Below are the scheduled incremental increases in the discount amount for Instant Connect leads:
You can find more info in the Lead Program Guidelines documentation and below is a quick summary overview of the criteria:
]]>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.
Submit your innovation to get featured
🚨Submissions deadline is June 15, 2022
Update: Check out the 2022 HITEC Orlando Innovation Showcase & Event Recap
💡 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
Related Update: Introducing Product Modules
Related Article: How to Post a Press Release
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...
UPDATE: This change went live on May 6, 2022 Learn more
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 report gets promoted:
BONUS: Check out HTR's guest post on Tripadvisor, How to Grow Your Hotel Business By Optimizing Your Tech Stack
The site wide navigation is the primary 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.
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.
]]>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'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!
]]>Later this month the Share of Voice variable will be given weight in the algorithm along with increased weight for review consistency which will therefore begin impacting rankings.
To check your Share of Voice or Review Consistency head to the Reputation Report Card.
Want to learn more about the update? Learn more
]]>HTR will be publishing the Official 2022 Market Map next month so please make sure that your company is properly represented and categorized.
Please complete the above inclusion request form by no later than February 15th to request any changes to how your company is represented in the market map prior to publication. Please note that no requests will be accepted after this deadline.
]]>Below you will find the most recent audience/segmentation snapshot as of January 31, 2022 per HTR's Updated Media Kit.
👉 JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR EARLY ACCESS 👈
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
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.
]]>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.
]]>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:
If you have access to multiple companies' vendor dashboards the company switcher will appear across your dashboards so you can more easily and quickly switch between your subsidiaries' dashboards.
]]>Related update: Discounted membership for subsidiaries Interested in discounted subsidiary membership?
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.
Rollout notes:
Update: Share of Voice Implemented
Continued from Phase II: HT Score Poseidon Update is now live
We’ll use two hypothetical vendors to illustrate the importance of this algorithm patch: Vendor A and Vendor B. Vendor A has 30 reviews from 30 hotels, Vendor B has 30 reviews from 1 hotel client.
In this example, you can see that while both vendors have the same # of reviews, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to credibility and install base since Vendor A has 30 verified hotel clients and Vendor B has only 1.
The Share of Voice variable will help identify potential client selection bias (aka. cherry picking) that can arise if a vendor is strategically only asking for feedback from a select number of clients versus reaching out to their full install base.
Most companies will not be impacted by this update. The only companies that will be impacted will be ones who have selectively sought to only seek feedback from lots of users at a small sample of client hotels.
*Note: You can still get a handful of reviews from a single property; however, if all of your reviews are coming from a small amount of properties the algorithm will identify this as potential cherry picking/gaming and your score will be impacted as a result
Just make sure you are reaching out organically for feedback to your client base instead of cherry picking select clients. Also, take note that while you may certainly collect a handful of reviews from different users at a given hotel--if your strategy has been to try to game the system and collect tons of reviews from a single hotel (or small number of hotels) this will be identified by the algorithm update and your score will be impacted. Hopefully it goes without saying but...make sure your review collection is organic, representative and diverse and you are not trying to game the system by gathering lots of a reviews from only a few select clients.
👉 Check out the Q4 Updated Media Kit
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.
]]>TL;DR
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 |
Submit your innovation to get featured
Update: HITEC Innovation Showcase is Now Live Read the recap
]]>]]>* Please note that while recommended, this is optional and your integration will continue to work regardless of whether you add these new fields or not.
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 🙌
This game of musical chairs amongst hotel tech buyers is creating opportunities for the top hotel tech companies to pull away from the pack.
What separates the best hotel tech companies from the rest? That's where the HotelTechAwards come in: using data to measure customer satisfaction, partner ecosystem strength, customer support processes, peer trustworthiness and more to determine the most loved products in hotel tech according to the judges that matter most, hoteliers.
Almost every major hotel tech company from San Francisco to Sydney is registered to compete in this year's awards for a chance to win the most coveted award in hotel tech so make sure to start collecting reviews asap to increase your chances of winning.
Below please find a few tips to help you kick things off strong and as always, if you have any questions along the way feel free to reach out anytime via the live chat on HTR--we're here to help!
👇 Scroll down for week 1 tips 👇
Week 1 Tips and Announcements
Learn how to launch an automated campaign
30-day free access ends on September 30, 2021
If you have any questions about the algorithm updates please refer to the scoring documentation or the Phase I announcement. If you're looking for personalized tips to improve your reputation, rankings and visibility--check out the Report Card and Coaching Checklist in your vendor dashboard.
Continued from Phase I: HT Score Poseidon Update
The final Phase III update (Client bias/Share of Voice variable) will be rolled out with the introduction of the Client Bias ranking signal no later than 11/1. Per the June 16th update for vendors to see in the dashboard but the weighting will go live after the end of the 2022 HotelTechAwards:
Client Bias (aka. Share of Voice). Hotel Tech Report’s policy has historically been to accept reviews from multiple users at a single hotel due to the fact that every user has a unique opinion/viewpoint on software. Having said that, collecting lots of reviews from only a handful of customers that aren't representative of your overall customer base indicates potential risk of bias.
We’ll use two hypothetical vendors to illustrate the importance of this algorithm patch: Vendor A and Vendor B. Vendor A has 30 reviews from 30 hotels, Vendor B has 30 reviews from 1 hotel client.
In this example, you can see that while both vendors have the same # of reviews, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to credibility and install base since Vendor A has 30 verified hotel clients and Vendor B has only 1.
The Share of Voice variable will help identify potential client selection bias (aka. cherry picking) that can arise if a vendor is strategically only asking for feedback from a select number of clients versus reaching out to their full install base.
Most companies will not be impacted by this update. The only companies that will be impacted will be ones who have selectively sought to only seek feedback from lots of users at a small sample of client hotels.
*Note: You can still get a handful of reviews from a single property; however, if all of your reviews are coming from a small amount of properties the algorithm will identify this as potential cherry picking/gaming and your score will be impacted as a result
Just make sure you are reaching out organically for feedback to your client base instead of cherry picking select clients. Also, take note that while you may certainly collect a handful of reviews from different users at a given hotel--if your strategy has been to try to game the system and collect tons of reviews from a single hotel (or small number of hotels) this will be identified by the algorithm update and your score will be impacted. Hopefully it goes without saying but...make sure you're review collection is organic, representative and diverse and you are not trying to game the system by gathering lots of a reviews from only a few select clients.
]]>Clients who spend in excess of $20k on packages benefit from additional volume discounts.
Package Size | Volume Discount |
---|---|
>$20k | Save 10% |
>$40k | Save 15% |
>$60k | Save 20% |
Terms: Please note that volume discounts cannot be combined with any other promotional offers, package value adds or agency discounts. Additionally, volume discounts are only offered with upfront payment for the full package.
Looking for additional agency partner discounts and perks? Learn more
]]>Agency Partner Accrued Spend Terms:
Phase I of the rollout gives vendors a chance to see potential impact to their rankings and what they can do to improve before the site wide rollout to all users. In Phase I vendors have the opportunity to see their new scores privately via their Reputation Report Card and Awards Live Leaderboard and get personalize tips to improve your score before the public rollout later this month (late August) via the Coaching Checklist in your vendor dashboard.
As a reminder, for the next few weeks during Phase I the updated rankings and scoring are only visible to vendors privately via the vendor dashboard and the awards leaderboard to make sure you have plenty of time to check your impact and take any necessary action (if needed) in advance of the update officially going live on the site.
While most companies' scores won't be heavily impacted, companies who don't have recent reviews of their products may experience significant drops in ranking and scores.
Head to the Reputation Report Card in your vendor dashboard to check your HT Score and ranking relative to what you see on the front end (ie. your profiles or category pages) of HotelTechReport.com.
See how to check your score impact
Not to worry, this is exactly why Phase I exists to give your team time to know what to expect and pre-empt any unexpected or undesired changes. The first thing you'll want to do is review the Coaching Checklist in the Reputation Report card which is sorted by potential impact (most important at the top). The main reason for companies dropping in score or rank with this update is due to inactivity and lack of recent reviews so this is an easy one to fix and HTR has several resources available to help Basic Members and Premium Members quickly and easily collect recent reviews.
Phase II will go live towards the end of August providing vendors several weeks of additional prep time leading into the official rollout to check their impact and collect reviews to mitigate any potential drops in scores/ranking due to inactivity.
]]>While HTR's audience has always been global, with the recent milestone of surpassing 140k+ monthly hoteliers and with over 50% of our traffic coming from outside of North America it became even more critical to ensure that the browsing experience was tailored to a global audience.
This update was strategically planned to roll out as travel begins to boom and hotels all over the world are starting to ramp back up to impressive numbers and as they do they continue to look to technology as a key enabler of progress and growth in for the recovery and beyond and this update will help ensure that HTR is able to serve them frictionlessly in their native language.
The software industry is a global one and we are excited to rollout this update along with massive traffic growth even during COVID to position Hotel Tech Report to serve as the go to resource that helps hoteliers across the globe discovery the best tools to run and grow their businesses.
Lastly, if you have any feedback about the translations or ideas to improve the site for your native speaking language please don't hesitate to reach out.
Note: This update auto-detects language based on the user's browser settings and can also be manually switched. The review form is also translated so that it is easier to collect reviews from non-english speaking users who may have older browsers that don't auto translate.
Hotel Tech Report consistently improves the HT Score ranking algorithm to incorporate variables and mechanisms that set out to productize buyer research and decision making criteria considered by savvy hotel tech buyers during the research, vetting and due diligence process to help hoteliers make better decisions, faster. Similar to Google's algorithm updates, HTR periodically rolls out updates to build upon and improve the scoring methodology over time.
The core purpose of this update is not to change the importance/weighting of the various quality signals in the scoring system, but instead to provide a more dynamic, consistent, and long-term scoring methodology that ensures an accurate, fair and current perspective of products in the market based on key buying decision criteria and real time data in the HTR platform.
The Poseidon algorithm update is outlined below in addition to tips for companies to optimize their presence, rankings and visibility. The Poseidon update will go into effect in mid-July '21 ensuring that all vendors have time to review the update and understand the potential implications that it might have on rankings.
Generally speaking, this group of updates takes into consideration something that has never been factored into the HT Score before which is that all reviews are not created equal. Old reviews aren't as important as new reviews, shallow reviews aren't as meaningful as in-depth reviews, lots of reviews from a small subset of clients aren't as representative as a few reviews from a large subset of clients and collecting lots of reviews at once tends to increase bias relative to a more sustainable long term feedback collection strategy. Below are additional details about the new criteria that will be factored into scoring in a dynamic way:
Last year the v1 additional bonus quality signals were introduced to the HT Score with binary static determination. This v1 implementation did not factor in the vast differences across products and categories ultimately rendering the quality signals with relatively little importance due to the fact that they were not dynamic. This update takes the old static variables and makes them dynamic within each category to ensure more accurate comparisons and assessments between products.
✅ Good | 🚫 Bad |
Showcase lots of recent reviews and customer feedback on your profiles that is reflective of the current product experience and customer relationships. | Few or no recent reviews with most reviews from a long time ago making it difficult for prospects to learn about the current user experience. |
Collect reviews from a wide array of customers that provides a representative and unbiased sample. | Collect lots of reviews from only a handful of customers that isn't representative of your overall customer base and indicates potential risk of bias. |
Create a sustainable process to regularly collect reviews organically and steadily showing that customer feedback is at the heart of your organizational processes and that hoteliers aren't pressured to leave reviews. | All of your reviews are collected within a short period of time indicating that feedback collection is not part of your team's internal processes and that hoteliers may have been bombarded with requests creating a stressful experience for users that can lead to bias and frustration. |
Collect reviews from customers in each of the key regions you serve geographically to increase chances of having strong customer feedback that is relevant to HTR's global audience of hoteliers. | Collect reviews from hoteliers in a single geography which signals to the algorithm that you are a regional provider that may not be able to service many of HTR's global audience of hoteliers. |
List and verify all of your integrations and collect recommendations from lots of your partners to show that your product and team are highly interoperable and come highly recommended by other top partners in the global ecosystem. | Only list and verify a few of your integrations and have minimal recommendations from other vendors in the community indicating to the algorithm and buyers that your company may be fairly nascent in the market and lacks a strong partner ecosystem. |
]]>Note: Please note that as with Google or any other ranking methodology, HTR's algorithm is proprietary and full disclosure of exact calculations has the negative consequence of leading to users attempting to game the system which is why the exact algorithm is not shared publicly. That said, HTR is committed to providing detailed documentation as well as the Reputation Report Card in the vendor dashboard to make sure it is simple and easy for your team to quickly assess the key drivers of the ranking methodology and identify ways to quickly and easily to optimize your rankings and presence.
Hotel Tech Report consistently improves the HT Score ranking algorithm to incorporate variables and mechanisms that set out to productize buyer research and decision making criteria considered by savvy hotel tech buyers during the research, vetting and due diligence process to help hoteliers make better decisions, faster. Similar to Google's algorithm updates, HTR periodically rolls out updates to build upon and improve the scoring methodology over time.
The core purpose of this update is not to change the importance/weighting of the various quality signals in the scoring system, but instead to provide a more dynamic, consistent, and long-term scoring methodology that ensures an accurate, fair and current perspective of products in the market based on key buying decision criteria and real time data in the HTR platform.
The Poseidon algorithm update is outlined below in addition to tips for companies to optimize their presence, rankings and visibility. The Poseidon update will go into effect in mid-July '21 ensuring that all vendors have time to review the update and understand the potential implications that it might have on rankings.
Generally speaking, this group of updates takes into consideration something that has never been factored into the HT Score before which is that all reviews are not created equal. Old reviews aren't as important as new reviews, shallow reviews aren't as meaningful as in-depth reviews, lots of reviews from a small subset of clients aren't as representative as a few reviews from a large subset of clients and collecting lots of reviews at once tends to increase bias relative to a more sustainable long term feedback collection strategy. Below are additional details about the new criteria that will be factored into scoring in a dynamic way:
Last year the v1 additional bonus quality signals were introduced to the HT Score with binary static determination. This v1 implementation did not factor in the vast differences across products and categories ultimately rendering the quality signals with relatively little importance due to the fact that they were not dynamic. This update takes the old static variables and makes them dynamic within each category to ensure more accurate comparisons and assessments between products.
✅ Good | 🚫 Bad |
Showcase lots of recent reviews and customer feedback on your profiles that is reflective of the current product experience and customer relationships. | Few or no recent reviews with most reviews from a long time ago making it difficult for prospects to learn about the current user experience. |
Collect reviews from a wide array of customers that provides a representative and unbiased sample. | Collect lots of reviews from only a handful of customers that isn't representative of your overall customer base and indicates potential risk of bias. |
Create a sustainable process to regularly collect reviews organically and steadily showing that customer feedback is at the heart of your organizational processes and that hoteliers aren't pressured to leave reviews. | All of your reviews are collected within a short period of time indicating that feedback collection is not part of your team's internal processes and that hoteliers may have been bombarded with requests creating a stressful experience for users that can lead to bias and frustration. |
Collect reviews from customers in each of the key regions you serve geographically to increase chances of having strong customer feedback that is relevant to HTR's global audience of hoteliers. | Collect reviews from hoteliers in a single geography which signals to the algorithm that you are a regional provider that may not be able to service many of HTR's global audience of hoteliers. |
List and verify all of your integrations and collect recommendations from lots of your partners to show that your product and team are highly interoperable and come highly recommended by other top partners in the global ecosystem. | Only list and verify a few of your integrations and have minimal recommendations from other vendors in the community indicating to the algorithm and buyers that your company may be fairly nascent in the market and lacks a strong partner ecosystem. |
]]>Note: Please note that as with Google or any other ranking methodology, HTR's algorithm is proprietary and full disclosure of exact calculations has the negative consequence of leading to users attempting to game the system which is why the exact algorithm is not shared publicly. That said, HTR is committed to providing detailed documentation as well as the Reputation Report Card in the vendor dashboard to make sure it is simple and easy for your team to quickly assess the key drivers of the ranking methodology and identify ways to quickly and easily to optimize your rankings and presence.
But while rapidly changing regulation, limited staffing and required physical distancing highlighted the importance of technology to survive in the face of uncertainty, what hoteliers across the world realized is that the benefits of leveraging technology to attract more customers, communicate more seamlessly and improve efficiency stretch far beyond COVID.
👉 Download the 2021 Market Leaders Report
We created this free report packed with data driven insights, product rankings, trend analysis and tons of additional free resources to serve as a primer to all things digital to inspire HTR’s global community of hoteliers as you prepare for the recovery.
Whether you’re looking to adopt contactless checkin to make guests feel more at ease upon arrival, find a channel manager to tap into new distribution channels, upgrade to a modern PMS so you don’t have to kick the hood three times and blow on the steering wheel to check a guest in (joking…kind of) or you're just looking for a resource to share with your team to help them get more familiar with the top tech tools that are available—this report has it all.
]]>👉 LEARN HOW TO CREATE YOUR FIRST WIDGET
The issue has been resolved but we appreciate your patience as it may take up to 24-hours for some users to be able to access the site without the error message.
]]>One of the requests that we've received from lots of members since is the ability to have a more streamlined and centralized place to track and use their various benefits so today we're excited to rollout the all new ledger and credit system 🧮 🚀
Along with the new ledger and credits system comes a newly redesigned dashboard home page that brings a simplified view to the ways you can leverage HTR to educate buyers, build your brand and grow your install base.
In order to simplify benefit tracking, benefits can now be tracked according to the type of item that they are (eg. advertising credit, content credit, posting credit, lead credit). Credits of each type can be used interchangeably for items that require the same credit type (eg. if you purchase 30 ad credits to run a sponsored retargeting campaign, you can instead decide to use those same ad credits for a different advertising product like an eblast).
Credits will automatically accrue with your membership and be valid for use throughout the duration of your membership the same as they have been.
If you are currently a member or have purchased ala cart credits off platform before you know how much of a pain this was. Now, you can view your credit balances for each type of credit (eg. Advertising credit, Content Credit, Lead Credit) etc right from the settings tab of your vendor dashboard. The new ledger system is also integrated into Membership Plans so when your plan renews, transactions are automatically created logging the benefits that you received with your membership plan and you will see your credit accounts increase respectively in real time.
If your company has post credits available on your account you can use them to post guest posts to build your brand as a thought leader and boost the visibility of your content to reach HTR's audience of 100k+ hoteliers each month by submitting guest posts right through the vendor dashboard.
If your company has starting balances it means that either a) you have purchased items in the past that have been converted 1-to-1 into the new credits system to simplify tracking and usage or (b) you have an active membership plan that is accruing credits automatically according to your plan benefits.
Unfortunately no. The ledger system is setup to track all transactions (credit purchases and usages) on a go forward basis so any past purchases will not be viewable in the ledger. That said, you will have a starting balance transaction that will include your company's current credit balances as of the launch date of the new ledger system. If you have questions about your starting balances or past transactions please feel free to reach out via the on-site live chat and a member of the team will be happy to assist.
No, prices haven't changed. All prices are the same as they were previously, the only difference is that now you will add credits to your account that can be used interchangeably towards various items instead of having to buy a specific item giving you more flexibility.
No, your membership plan is exactly the same and includes the same benefits as always. The only difference is that you can now use use credits accrued from your benefits on other items as well. For example, let's say your plan includes 10 press releases/year which is equal to 10 post credits. If you want, you could now instead choose to use those 10 post credits towards another type of posting like Guest Posting instead.
]]>That said, some clients have requested additional targeting options specifically the ability to exclude certain brands that they do not want to (or cannot) work with.
Today HTR is rolling out a new feature to be able to add additional targeting/filtering to the lead inbox by submitting up to 5 brand exclusions to add to your account so that:
Add brand filters to your account
This new benefit is now available to Premium Members (all plans) at no additional charge and non-members can add additional brand level targeting for a flat annual fee of $2500/year.
]]>Check out the new top rated products announcement page bringing the winners of the annual HotelTechAwards front and center on HTR year round to garner more visibility and leads.
But with every crisis comes opportunity and here at Hotel Tech Report, we've spent the last 3-months scouring the globe for the best tech products to bring your hotel back stronger than ever in 2021.
During the 3-month 2021 HotelTechAwards period, 318,466 hoteliers across 127 countries visited Hotel Tech Report and spent more than 3,000 hours contributing 10,227 verified hotel software product reviews to help you save time, make better vendor decisions and determine the best hotel tech products of the year.
HTR's community of hoteliers from the world's leading hotel companies surfaced innovative products ranging from contactless check-in solutions and next-gen guest messaging all the way to automated revenue management systems and business intelligence software.
We are excited to share with you the best hotel tech products of 2021!
View the full announcement eblast
Learn more about what happens on December 15th after the cutoff deadline
Check out the answers to the FAQs
Well, thanks to Laura @ protel and Thomas @ Revinate--you can sleep easy tonight with the all new redesigned integrations experience 🙌
Now you can...
No, your balances will not be impacted. Companies will maintain the same dollar value balance, the only difference is that content credits now have a base price of $1000 instead of $250 previously. Here's an example of why this doesn't impact your balance in terms of dollar value:
Example: If your company had a previous content credit balance of 10 credits this had a dollar value of $2500 (10 x $250). Since content credits are now valued at $1,000, your company would still have $2500 worth of content credit on your account, but it would now be 1.5 credits instead of 10 credits ($2500/ $1000=1.5 credits).
Premium Members still do receive the same discounted pricing on all items as they did previously as well as all of the benefits included with your membership which can be found in your membership portal.
Over the course of 2020 tons of new benefits have been added to membership including: lead credit, post credit, content credit, advertising credit, awards credit and more. As these credit types have grown, so has the complexity in managing, tracking and using credits. Therefore, in Q1 '21 HTR is rolling out a new dashboard home page and ledger system (sneak peek) to make this process more seamless, easy to utilize and transparent for members. This update is in preparation of the upcoming improvements to the dashboard and credit management system.
]]>With the rebuilt review manager and improved performance more companies have been sending more campaigns and larger campaigns. To ensure strong deliverability new daily sending limits have been implemented which include (1) 250 users/campaign (2) 500 requests sent/day
If its your first time sending a review campaign it might take you some brain racking to figure out what the heck to write to get users to leave reviews. The review manager now has new pre-written base STARTER templates to save you to time.
Its important to remember these are STARTER templates and are meant to serve as a starting point but you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD CUSTOMIZE AND MAKE THEM YOUR OWN. Remember, your goal is to follow all of the best practices but most importantly:
You can also check out more pre-written starter templates in the help center and
]]>Please note that in order to access the Member Bot you must: (a) be logged in (b) have an active membership plan (check your member portal)
Here are a few of the topics that Member Bot can assist with:
Get unverified reviews verified faster with self-verifications. Premium members can now utilize a new type of verifications, self verification. Self verifications mean you have to reach out to hoteliers fewer times while getting more reviews approved and verified.
Pre-fill links to run targeted campaigns to users and pre-select the products they use to reduce fields and increase conversion.
⏯Pre-filling links (in the review manager)
⏯Pre-fill links (outside of the review manager)
Followup with users who didn't leave a review after campaigns are complete without going 1-by-1. Once users complete a campaign, then what? Instead of going one by one you can now bulk select and send a mass outreach template to lots of users at once.
Feature request shout out: Michelle @ HelloShift
Filter reviews by product to save time flipping between profiles. Save time flipping between profiles to read reviews and see which products each reviewer chose to review right from the review manager and filter your reviews by product to more easily find specific reviews.
Feature request shout out: Michelle @ HelloShift
Easily sort reviews by status to see when reviews are pending, which reviews you need to respond to or to hunt down rejected reviews and get them verified.
Feature inspiration shout out: Elena @ Monscierge
If you have tried pasting text into the custom templates in the automated review manager previously you may have noticed that the formatting carries over and can lead to inconsistencies if you don't reformat the styles from within the review manager. Now the templates feature will automatically strip out excess formatting to ensure consistency in your templates.
Feature request shout out: Marvin and Ari @ RoomPriceGenie
Preview your campaigns before you press send.
Members can now request an export of review data for internal analysis to share with product, customer success and marketing teams right from the review manager. (Note: Only company admins can access this feature). You can also download a suppression list right from the review manager.
👏 Feature request inspiration shout out: Saahil @ Oaky
We recently added a new templates library section to the help center that includes inspiration for copy/paste templates for your team to use and to add to the review manager to help you save time and increase conversion. Be sure to check out our latest high converting templates for collecting reviews during COVID times.
]]>👏 Feature request inspiration shout out: Flora @ GuestJoy
]]>👏 Feature request inspiration shout out: Anait @ D-EDGE
]]>Below is a table outlining such penalties based on the level of infraction. Hotel Tech Report values integrity and fairness above all else - violations penalties are non-negotiable.
HTR's policy for 1st time Level 1 infractions where the offender claims it was an accidental violation or misunderstanding is to give the offender in question the benefit of the doubt for a first time offense. Additional Level 1 violations after the first however will immediately escalate to level 2 infractions and incur penalties.
👏 Feature request inspiration shout out: Elena @ Monscierge
]]>Media Kit Preview: