TL;DR

• Several pay-per-review incident reports.  We have become aware of several vendors have been offering pay-per-review without knowing that this is against HTR’s incentive guidelines
• This is against HTR’s guidelines and the rules of the awards.  While this is a level I infraction (least severe), it is still against HTR’s policies and therefore not permitted, in violation of the rules of the 2022 HotelTechAwards
• Penalties for current HotelTechAwards competition. Vendors caught in breach of this policy will have the reviews from the trailing 30-days be unpublished and will not be counted towards the HotelTechAwards competition as it is against the rules
• Several vendors have claimed not to be aware of this aspect of the incentive policy.  Several vendors have pointed out that the confusion lies in the fact that other review sites do permit this type of pay-per-review incentive
• Implications for incentives on the community.  While these reviews are against the rules of the awards competition and HTR’s incentive guidelines, HTR will amend its policy effective January 15, 2021 to permit pay-per-review with fair disclosure in accordance with FTC guidelines.  Incentivized reviews will be clearly designated in the UI and ratings will not factor into overall averages.

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.

Overview of Current Policies & Perspectives on Incentivized Reviews

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: 

1. Reviewing B2B software is not the same as consumer goods.  When a guest is reviewing their hotel on TripAdvisor for example there are intrinsic motivations like scrap booking to catalogue their journeys, building online clout/credibility or sharing an experience with friends.  Reviewing B2B software is quite different in nature and carries lower intrinsic motivation which is why incentives are a helpful tool to gather more feedback and foster knowledge sharing.  Incentivizing a review of B2B software is similar to paying for a survey completion - compensating for a busy individual’s professional time without biasing the content of feedback.
2. Incentives as a way to thank customers are encouraged.  Incentives are common in the B2B review space.  Companies are asking their users to take time out of a busy work day to help with their sales and marketing by advocating for their product. As such, offering an incentive is not only acceptable but we actually encourage it.  So much so that we even subsidize incentives for Premium Members and have an incentive matching program for basic members
3. Outreach may never be phrased in a way that introduces bias.  While incentives are encouraged, there are obviously guidelines to follow to ensure that the way the incentive is phrased to the user does not introduce bias into their review.  Specifically, to date HTR has outlined several permitted and not permitted scenarios which vary in level of severity and of which examples can be found below:

Vendor Infractions & Penalties for Pay-Per-Review

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:

1. Vendor will have 72-hours to respond to the violation report and show that they have corrected their outreach messaging with screenshot evidence
2. Reviews collected within 30-days of the correction will be unpublished and will not count towards the annual HotelTechAwards competition.
3. Vendors who have been reported for breaching this guideline will be marked under close watch for up to 90-days where their account will be monitored closely and reviews will appear in a separate moderation queue where moderators will keep a closer eye on activity.
4. Vendors in breach will only be permitted to collect reviews via the Review Manager in the dashboard for 45-days where HTR can more closely monitor their activity and outreach strategy
5. Vendors will receive a strike meaning that any future incidents will incur more severe immediate level II penalties without option to cure

Future Amendments to HTR’s Incentive Policies

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:

• “Knowing that reviewers got the product they reviewed for free would probably affect the weight your customers give to the reviews”
• “reviewers given free products might give the products higher ratings on a scale like the number of stars than reviewers who bought the products.”
• “If you've given these customers a reason to expect a benefit from providing their thoughts about your product, you should disclose that fact in your ads.”
• “If you’re offering them something of value in return for these reviews, tell them in advance that they should disclose what they received from you.”

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?

• The write a review form will include a field for hoteliers to indicate whether direct compensation has been offered for their product feedback
• Vendors will have a toggle in their dashboard indicating when they are running a pay per review campaign (on or off platform)
• Vendors found to be running direct incentive campaigns without using the toggle will have all reviews within 6-months of the incident report immediately marked as ‘incentivized’
• Directly incentivized reviews will NOT count towards the quantitative ratings averages.  Their volumes will count towards the average review thresholds and geographic targets, however, ratings like customer support, ease of use, etc. will not be included in overall ratings in order to ensure “apples to apples” comparisons amongst all vendors for buyers without the possibility of potential bias

Conclusion

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 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).

• Impact: Minor.  Impacted only select countries and select reviews.  Some companies may have experienced slightly deflated region and country bonuses if they had reviews from select countries that had mapping issues when the user selected their location via the Google Places API.
• Issue: Edge case identified where certain country codes were not mapped properly to their region and/or country as it pertains to the calculation in the HT Score algorithm related to global reach bonuses.

What happened?

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.

Which countries were identified to have potential mapping issues?

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:

• 'Virgin Islands
•  'United States of America'
•  'United Kingdom'
•  'Turks and Caicos Islands'
•  'Tanzania'
•  'Spain'
•  'Seychelles'
•  'Saint Martin (French part)'
•  'Saint Barthélemy'
•  'Russian Federation'
•  'Poland'
•  'Norway'
•  'Netherlands'
•  'Netherlands Antilles'
•  'Myanmar'
•  'Morocco'
•  'Maldives'
•  'Macedonia'
•  'Luxembourg'
•  'Korea
•  'Italy'
•  'Ireland'
•  'Greece'
•  'Germany'
•  'Gambia'
•  'France'
•  'Finland'
•  'Czech Republic'
•  'Congo (Kinshasa)'
•  'China'
•  'Belgium'
•  'Bahamas'
•  'Australia'
•  'Austria'
•  'Switzerland'
•  'Brunei Darussalam'
•  'Hungary'
•  'United Arab Emirates'
•  'Estonia'
•  'Fiji'
•  'Indonesia'
•  'Sweden'
•  'Cyprus'

Who was impacted and what was the impact?

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.

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.

FAQS

1. Does this change impact scoring? No, this DOES NOT impact scoring in any way.  It just changes the primary variable that shows in view in notifications, the review form and review manager as the focus variable
2. Was likelihood to recommend rating captured before? Yes, this variable has always been collected and has always been the most important of the ratings.  The only change is that it used to be on page 2 of the review form, now it is the first question on the first page.

As a result, there are three areas you will see the likelihood to recommend rating surfaced as the focused variable:

1. Moved from Page 2 to Page 1 of the Review Form

2. Moved into Focus in New Review Notifications

3. Moved Into Focus in the Review Manager

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After receiving 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: 

• Keyword tagging: The review form now will display keyword inspiration to users based on the categories they select and prompt users to use at least one keyword per product category to guide the user to provide more relevant and helpful content.
• 3-product maximum: While hoteliers can still review multiple products, they cannot review more than 3 products to keep their review focused and ensure that they include relevant feedback and content for each of the products they choose to review.

These changes serve to make reviews more reliable, accurate, relevant and helpful for hoteliers.

The 3rd and final Phase of the Poseidon algorithm update is now live and can be seen in the Reputation Report Card.

Rollout notes: 

1. Please note that more than 90% of companies on Hotel Tech Report will not be impacted by this update.  Only companies with lots of reviews from very few hotels are likely to notice any impact.
2. Please note that while Share of Voice will now display in the Reputation Report card for companies to see their current standings, it will not impact scoring for the 2022 HotelTechAwards and its weighting will be officially rolled out into the algorithm in February 2022 after winners are announced

Update: Share of Voice Implemented

Continued from Phase II: HT Score Poseidon Update is now live

What is the Share of Voice client bias update?

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.

Who will be impacted by the client bias update?

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

What can we do to maximize our score for the client bias update?

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.

Related updates: 

• Phase I: HTScore Poseidon Update Rollout
• Phase II: HT Score Poseidon Update is now live  Continue

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This week we're rolling out tons of new features in the review manager to help streamline your workflows and make it easier to filter through large lists.

1. Simplified List Management

1a. Clear out customers that you no longer want in the review manager

• What is it? Ability to select customers and soft delete them from the review manager without losing their event history and timeline. You can also re-add them later and their old status and activity history will repopulate in the timeline
• How does it help? Remove customers that you don't want to reach out to for reviews to clear out and organize your review manager as your customer list grows.

1b. Clean out your review manager to start fresh with a single click

• What is it? As you run campaigns over time the review manager continues to build up more and more customers which can make it harder to manage over time.  Eventually, you may get to a point where you just want to start over and from scratch and that's where this nifty new 'start fresh' feature comes in.  Reach out to HTR at any time and we can do a soft reset of your review manager quickly and easily to help you start fresh with your campaigns.
• How does it help? Reset your review manager to re-start your campaigns and outreach with a clean slate

1c. Streamlined clients tab, filter by status and archived is now unsubscribed

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'.

• What is it? Simplified view of the clients tab now with statuses
• How does it help? Filter the clients tab by status to get a quick skimmable spreadsheet view of your customers and where they are in the review collection process and also be able to easily unsubscribe/re-subscribe

1d. New customer tags to create and manage segments

• What is it? Create custom tags that you can use to create unique segments of customers in the review manager and filter the review manager by your custom tags.  Import your lists with tags to streamline your workflows and be able to create custom segments.
• How does it help? Tags allow you to be able to create customer segments to slice and dice your list in any way that you'd like.  Add campaign tags, geographic tags, batch tags, start date tags, property type tags, language tags or anything else you can imagine.

2. Improved UX

2a. Pick up where you left off with ease

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: 

• What is it? Bookmarked state for selected customers 
• How does it help? Page no longer shifts when clicking into customer timeline detail view so you can more easily keep track while switching between customers

2b. Improved customer selection UX

3. New Workflows

3a. Filter the entire review manager by campaign

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.

• What is it? Filter the entire review manager by campaign so you can
• How does it help? See exactly how a campaign is performing (or performed) so you can take strategic actions to execute personalized followup by segment

3b. Ability to send customers follow-on campaigns

• What is it? Previously, once you ran a campaign to customers there was no way to run another campaign to them.
• How does it help? Now you can quickly and easily move customers who had been in an old campaign right into the campaign setup tab to be able to send them another campaign

3c. Re-trigger verification emails to customers 

• What is it? Manually re-trigger the verification link to be sent to customers for 'unverified' reviews
• How does it help? This is particularly helpful if you have a client who left a review but didn't click the verification link and they're saying they never received it. Now you can manually re-trigger it to be sent to them on the spot

4. Enriched Exporting

4a. Export customer statuses to leverage in your own tools

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.

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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).

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