3 years ago

Phase I: HTScore Poseidon Update Rollout

Phase I of the HTScore Poseidon Algorithm update that was announced back in June is now live.

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.

FAQs

Will my ranking and scores be impacted?

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.

How will I know if my HTScore or ranking will drop significantly due to the update?

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

If our products look like they will drop in score or rank after the update goes live, what can we do to mitigate this?

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.

When will the update officially go live to the rest of the site (Phase II)?

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.

3 years ago

🇧🇯 HTR is now available in four new languages!

What do Spanish, German, French and Italian all have in common? They're all now native languages on Hotel Tech Report! That means users can seamlessly browse native translations right on HTR across reviews, partner recommendations, articles and more!

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.

3 years ago

HT Score Poseidon Algorithm Update Q3 21

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.

All Reviews Are Not Created Equal...

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:

Decay factor on review volume. Previously review volume in the category minimum review threshold was based on all time reviews with no difference between the important of a review from years ago to a review left today about a users current product experience. Now, the impact of reviews towards HTScore variables will evenly decay overtime over a 36-month period meaning that reviews older than 3-years will not be counted in terms of category average volumes. As a result, recent reviews will carry more weight than old reviews since they are more reflective of the current product and customer experience. This decay in weight will be gradual to avoid drastic and sudden changes.
Review depth. Companies that build outstanding products that customers love develop strong communities of passionate customer advocates and product mavens who have insightful feedback about the product and take the time to engage in ways to support the development, growth and success of companies they love. Additionally, in-depth reviews provide more value to users by painting clear user scenarios, pros and cons to help buyers on HTR better understand the product offering available to make a more informed decision. For these reasons, in-depth reviews will now be factored in as a weighting variable (relative to review depth from peers in the same category) and an indicator of customer engagement and likelihood to recommend.
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. Therefore, we will be implementing a maximum limit of 5 reviews/property that can be counted in scoring to eliminate potential bias from a small subset of customers that may not be representative of the overall client base.
Customer centric processes. Companies who create a sustainable process to regularly collect reviews organically and steadily overtime indicate that customer feedback is at the heart of their organizational processes. As a result, companies who show stable review collection will be rewarded as a key indicator of organic review collection, strong internal feedback loops and customer centricity.

Static-->Dynamic Quality Signals

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.

Dynamic scoring updates. The following bonuses will move from binary fixed points into a dynamic scoring system relative to other products in the respective category for more accurate comparison: Global reach, partner recommendations, staying power, company resources
Global coverage bonus. Historically the geographic reach bonus only factored in # of countries with 5+ reviews. The issue with countries is that some regions have dozens of countries (eg. Europe) and some only have a handful (eg. North America) but ultimately the key factor is likelihood that a vendor will be able to service a user in the global market place. To improve the effectiveness of the geo bonus and remove potential country inequality, a regional coverage variable will be added to the global reach bonus to provide a more accurate view of global market coverage. Regions include: North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East/Africa, South America
Ecosystem health bonus. A new variable will be added for app ecosystem health that factors aggregate HTScores and ratings of all verified integration partners. Products with the highest quality app ecosystems not only have a higher probability of being able to effectively service more users in the global market place, but ecosystem health also serves as an indicator of engineering resources, company reputation and ability to deliver a more seamless customer experience through a holistically integrated tech stack of world class products.

The Good & The Bad (Examples of both)

✅ 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.

Tips to Optimize Your Rankings for the Upcoming Update

💡Tip #1: Make sure you have recent reviews that are reflective of the current product experience for buyers (Related to: Review decay)
💡Tip #2: Make sure you diversify your review collection and don't have all of your reviews from only a small number of hotels (Related to: Client bias)
💡Tip #3: Make sure you have a consistent and organic review collection process built into your team's workflows and avoid large burst campaigns that inundate and overwhelm clients (Related to: Erratic Collection Penalty)
💡Tip #4: Make sure you diversify your review collection across your customer base's geographic regions to maximize your global coverage and geo bonus (Related to: Global Coverage Bonus)
💡Tip #5: Make sure all of your integrations are listed and verified and you have as many recommendations from partners as you can to maximize your partner ecosystem bonus (Related to: Ecosystem health bonus)

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.

3 years ago

HT Score Poseidon Algorithm Update (Q3 21)

All Reviews Are Not Created Equal...

Decay factor on review volume. Previously review volume in the category minimum review threshold was based on all time reviews with no difference between the important of a review from years ago to a review left today about a users current product experience. Now, the impact of reviews towards HTScore variables will evenly decay overtime over a 36-month period meaning that reviews older than 3-years will not be counted in terms of category average volumes. As a result, recent reviews will carry more weight than old reviews since they are more reflective of the current product and customer experience. This decay in weight will be gradual to avoid drastic and sudden changes.
Review depth. Companies that build outstanding products that customers love develop strong communities of passionate customer advocates and product mavens who have insightful feedback about the product and take the time to engage in ways to support the development, growth and success of companies they love. Additionally, in-depth reviews provide more value to users by painting clear user scenarios, pros and cons to help buyers on HTR better understand the product offering available to make a more informed decision. For these reasons, in-depth reviews will now be factored in as a weighting variable (relative to review depth from peers in the same category) and an indicator of customer engagement and likelihood to recommend.
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. Therefore, we will be implementing a maximum limit of 5 reviews/property that can be counted in scoring to eliminate potential bias from a small subset of customers that may not be representative of the overall client base.
Customer centric processes. Companies who create a sustainable process to regularly collect reviews organically and steadily overtime indicate that customer feedback is at the heart of their organizational processes. As a result, companies who show stable review collection will be rewarded as a key indicator of organic review collection, strong internal feedback loops and customer centricity.

Static-->Dynamic Quality Signals

Dynamic scoring updates. The following bonuses will move from binary fixed points into a dynamic scoring system relative to other products in the respective category for more accurate comparison: Global reach, partner recommendations, staying power, company resources
Global coverage bonus. Historically the geographic reach bonus only factored in # of countries with 5+ reviews. The issue with countries is that some regions have dozens of countries (eg. Europe) and some only have a handful (eg. North America) but ultimately the key factor is likelihood that a vendor will be able to service a user in the global market place. To improve the effectiveness of the geo bonus and remove potential country inequality, a regional coverage variable will be added to the global reach bonus to provide a more accurate view of global market coverage. Regions include: North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East/Africa, South America
Ecosystem health bonus. A new variable will be added for app ecosystem health that factors aggregate HTScores and ratings of all verified integration partners. Products with the highest quality app ecosystems not only have a higher probability of being able to effectively service more users in the global market place, but ecosystem health also serves as an indicator of engineering resources, company reputation and ability to deliver a more seamless customer experience through a holistically integrated tech stack of world class products.

The Good & The Bad (Examples of both)

✅ 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.

Tips to Optimize Your Rankings for the Upcoming Update

💡Tip #1: Make sure you have recent reviews that are reflective of the current product experience for buyers (Related to: Review decay)
💡Tip #2: Make sure you diversify your review collection and don't have all of your reviews from only a small number of hotels (Related to: Client bias)
💡Tip #3: Make sure you have a consistent and organic review collection process built into your team's workflows and avoid large burst campaigns that inundate and overwhelm clients (Related to: Erratic Collection Penalty)
💡Tip #4: Make sure you diversify your review collection across your customer base's geographic regions to maximize your global coverage and geo bonus (Related to: Global Coverage Bonus)
💡Tip #5: Make sure all of your integrations are listed and verified and you have as many recommendations from partners as you can to maximize your partner ecosystem bonus (Related to: Ecosystem health bonus)

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.

3 years ago

Performance Improvements

We're excited to announce that we recently completed a ground up backed rebuild and optimization of core pages throughout HTR including the home page, category pages, profiles and the blog dramatically improving page load speeds and user experience across the site. Enjoy!

3 years ago

💧New eBook Drop: What do telemedicine, remote work and NFTs have in common?

Each of these trends were inevitable tech enabled shifts in the way we interact and collaborate as a species whose adoption was vastly accelerated by COVID-19.

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.

3 years ago

🚀 New Customizable Widgets Library

Looking for more ways to leverage your Hotel Tech Report reviews throughout your sales and marketing to build trust with prospects? Well today's your lucky day...introducing the new customizable HTR widgets library!

👉 LEARN HOW TO CREATE YOUR FIRST WIDGET

Create Custom Widgets in Seconds. Create customizable widgets to showcase your HTR reviews on your website in seconds
Tailor to Your Use Case. Create widgets for your overall company (all products) or specific products to add to specific product related landing pages
Build Trust with Prospects. Leverage your reviews to build trust with prospects on your website, landing pages and book a demo pages
No Code Editing. Paste your widget once and edit them anytime right from the dashboard with no coding or developers needed
Boost Your Landing Page SEO & Click Throughs. Improve your landing page SEO and Google page click throughs by adding any of HTR's review widgets which contain Google product review markup (show review count and average rating in search results)
Ultra Lightweight. Widgets are designed to be ultra-lightweight and fast loading

3 years ago

Subsidiary Memberships

Is Your Company a Premium Member with a Subsidiary and You Want to Unlock Membership Benefits for Your Subsidiary without Purchasing a New Membership at Full Price? Premium Members can now receive discounted Premium Membership for their subsidiaries to access member features, benefits and exclusive discounts without having to purchase an entirely new membership for the separate company.

Silver Members: Get 50% discounted Silver Annual Membership for additional subsidiary companies you would like to access member benefits, credits and discounts
Gold Members: Includes free Silver Annual Membership for up to 1x subsidiary company
Platinum Members: Includes free Silver Annual Membership for up to 3x subsidiary companies

Learn more about discounted subsidiary membership

3 years ago

Site routing issue

It has been brought to our attention that some users may be experiencing a site routing issue. HTR's hosting provider had an issue this morning that overwrote our DNS settings and was quickly resolved but may take up to 24-hours to propagate.

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.

3 years ago

New Ledger & Credit System for Members

With the rollout of Premium 3.0 came lots of new benefits included with membership packages ranging from guest posting to review incentive cards, sponsored articles, advertising, lead credit and more.

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 🧮 🚀

WHAT: New dashboard home, credits system, ledger and self service guest posting
WHY: Make it easier for members to track, manage and use their benefits

New Dashboard Home

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.

New Credits System

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.

New Ledger System

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.

Self Service Guest Posting

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.

FAQs

How did my company get starting balances?

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.

Can I see my company's history retroactively?

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.

Has pricing changed with the new credits system?

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.

Have my membership benefits changed?

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.