Empowering the next generation of hoteliers to embrace their greatest asset, technology.
Geographic bonuses in the HT Score are counted based on # of reviews a given product has with 5 or more reviews from a given country or region. Now you can see which countries and regions you have achieved this for right from the reputation report card.
Loving partner recommendations and showing love to your top partners on HTR? Ever wish there was a way for your top partners to promote you to their customers and vice versa? Well...now you can! Introducing the all new Favorite Partners Feature.
TL;DR
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 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.
Previously the review form used to capture an overall rating and a likelihood to recommend rating. Since both were essentially two versions of an overall user rating they were duplicative which is why likelihood to recommend was (and always has) been the 'overall rating' factored into the HT Score to avoid duplicative counting of similar ratings.
In order to simplify the review form and show the more important variable front and center, the overall rating (/5) has been deprecated fully to reduce form fields and avoid capturing ratings that didn't count towards scoring and likelihood to recommend now shows in the UI in areas where the overall rating showed previously. Likelihood to recommend has always been the most important rating in the HT Score and therefore it is being moved front and center in the UI to better reflect its significance.
As a result, there are three areas you will see the likelihood to recommend rating surfaced as the focused variable:
Managing multiple subsidiary companies and need an easier way to switch between company dashboards? Introducing the new subsidiary dashboard switcher 🙌
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?
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:
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:
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.
Working on your 2022 growth and budgeting planning? HTR's updated Q4 Media Kit includes the latest marketing solutions that HTR has to offer ranging from PPC advertising campaigns to content production to bundled membership packages.
👉 Check out the Q4 Updated Media Kit
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.
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.
