The annual 2022 HotelTechIndex and hotel tech ecosystem market map are now live.  Special thanks to our sponsor Tripadvisor for supporting the creation of the most downloaded piece of content year after year on HTR.

📣 The report gets promoted:

• Tripadvisor newsletter featured placement and social share
• Year round social paid media campaigns
• On-site promotion to HTR's audience of 180k+ monthly hoteliers
• Dedicated eblast to 40k+ opt in hoteliers on HTR's newsletter list 
• Featured placement in HTR's monthly newsletter, theRewind

Download the report 

BONUS: Check out HTR's guest post on Tripadvisor, How to Grow Your Hotel Business By Optimizing Your Tech Stack

Today we rolled out a redesign to the main site navigation on HTR to bring more content front and center and help users quickly find their way to relevant information.

The site wide navigation is the 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.

The new sub-category pages signal a shift in perspective where there is no longer an emphasis on a 'one size fits all' approach.

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.

Special Thank You to Premium Members

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.

As of this week we're rolling out redesigned sub-category pages.  These pages will serve as hubs for relevant content about each sub-category with new filters to help users move beyond a single top solution recommendation and instead help users identify the solution that is right for them.

Key changes: 

1. 🎯 Segment based recommendations & buyer personas
2. ⚙️ New data filters to give users the power to find the right fit
3. 📖 Unified content hub of helpful resources

🎯 Segment Based Recommendations & Buyer Personas

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.  

⚙️ New data filters to give users the power to find the right fit

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.

📖 Unified Content Hub of Helpful Resources

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: 

• Recommended articles
• Free report downloads
• Category buyers guide
• In-depth deep dive (overview, benefits, features, pricing, implementation and FAQs)
• Related categories

We're excited to share that the Hospitality for Peace initiative is now live! (view press release)

We've already raised $52,500 from fellow hotel tech companies to provide much needed humanitarian relief in Ukraine.

CURRENT FUNDING UP TO $393,227! track progress live

On top of that, corporate partners have committed to matching an additional $280,000 when the campaign reaches $100k (view corporate partners)

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." ~ Hellen Keller

Needless to say, we're stronger and can make more of an impact when we work together as a community--and that's where you come in... 

• In order to unlock the full amount of match donations, we need to raise $100k from the community during the 30-day campaign between now and April 15
• Hotel tech companies have already donated $52,500 which means we only need to raise an additional $47,500k to unlock the full match donations
• We need your help to spread the word to your employees, colleagues and customers to make sure we hit the $100k milestone needed to unlock the full corporate match donations

A few easy ways you can help: 

1. Post on social media to help spread the word
2. Email your customers and partners
3. Email your employees & encourage them to share with their network
4. Add the solidarity ribbon to your website
5. Make a donation

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!

Per the October '21 announcement, the Share of Voice variable went live in vendor dashboards but was not to impact scoring until after the 2022 HotelTechAwards winners were announced to ensure that (a) scoring didn't change during the competition and (b) all vendors had several months to prepare for the update to pre-empt any potential negative impact to rankings.  

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

Each year Hotel Tech Report puts out the definitive Hotel Technology Market Map used by the industry.  Last year's 2021 Hotel Tech Market Map was one of the most downloaded pieces of content all year and gots included in the annual HotelTechIndex Market Leaders Report. 

HTR will be publishing the Official 2022 Market Map next month so please make sure that your company is properly represented and categorized.

Request market map update

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.

Each quarter HTR releases updated audience stats as well as a trailing 1,000 leads snapshot that shows segmentation of recent leads through the platform.  

Below you will find the most recent audience/segmentation snapshot as of January 31, 2022 per HTR's Updated Media Kit.

TL;DR

• What is it...Once a year limited availability sponsorship opportunity for a single vendor to be the exclusive sponsor in each category of HTR's official budget season buyer's guide
• What's included...High quality turnkey co-branded content, exclusive native advertising placement in your category for a full year on Hotel Tech Report and 1-year content license to leverage the guide throughout your marketing to generate leads
• When is it available...2025 Budget Season Buyer's Guides are open for sponsors to reserve beginning April 1st for Premium Members and May 15th for basic members.
• Limited availability...Since there is only one spot per year in each category, guides are offered on a first-come-first-served basis.  
• A few reasons to become a sponsor...Buyer's guides are one of HTR's best value offerings because they not only include turnkey content production but sponsorship also includes year round exclusivity as well as targeted native advertising front and center to own your category for a full year on HTR.  

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👉 CHECK AVAILABILITY 👈

Related article: Buyer's guide sponsorship FAQs

What is a buyer's guide?

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.

Key Dates & Deadlines

*Underlined = sponsor involvement

• Jan 15 - April 1: HotelTechAward pre-sale early reservations access and waitlist open
• April 1 -May 1: Premium Member early reservation period
• May 1-June 1: Regular registration period
• June 15-July 15: HTR designs and produces buyers guides drafts
• July 29-August 15th: Sponsor feedback and content collaboration period (Round 1)
• August 8 - August 20th: HTR implements round 1 feedback
• August 8 - August 15: Sponsor review period and final revisions (Round 2)
• August 20 - August 30: HTR implements final revisions
• September 1: Guides go live as they finish production and begin being promoted on HotelTech Report and sponsors receive hard copy along with 1-year content license
• Sept 1, 2024-August 30, 2025: 1-year buyers guide placement and promotion on Hotel Tech Report through 2025 budget season

Buyers guide sponsor FAQs

1. What does it mean to be a sponsor?
2. What are the benefits?
3. What is the process once my company registers?
4. How much does it cost?
5. Is there a performance marketing model available?

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.