Hotel Tech Report Updates Center logo

Updates Center

Empowering the next generation of hoteliers to embrace their greatest asset, technology.

Subscribe to Updates

Labels

  • All Posts
  • premium
  • PPC
  • lead generation
  • promo opportunities
  • rankings/ht score
  • review manager
  • other product updates
  • Awards
  • bug fixes

Jump to Month

  • May 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • March 2024
  • January 2024
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • April 2018
  • October 2017
Release notes byAnnounceKit

Create yours, for free!

premiumother product updates
3 years ago

Introducing the App Store API

Want to add HTR product ratings to enrich the experience for your user's in your app store, integrations page or marketplace?  The App Store API gives forward thinking media partners, app stores, marketplace facilitators and service providers API access to HTR's data set allowing approved partners to easily enrich their product with HTR ratings and reviews to add helpful context for users and bring your app stores to life. 



Learn more


Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
other product updates
3 years ago

Introducing Feature Groups

One of the biggest pain points hoteliers have when selecting software is being inundated with a laundry list of features that aren't standardized and take time and effort to organize, prioritize and figure out which ones they care about and need and compare vendors.  Today, we're rolling out the new feature groups feature (no pun intended) to make it easier than ever for hoteliers to understand, visualize and compare the core capabilities of products to quickly understand the most important aspects to focus on.


Related Update: Introducing Product Modules



Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
premium
3 years ago

Premium Membership Agreement

This Premium Membership Agreement ("Agreement") is made and entered into by and between CITYKEY LLC (DBA HotelTechReport), and the subscribing entity ("Member"). This Agreement sets forth the terms and conditions under which Member agrees to subscribe to and use the Company's Premium Membership services.

 

1. Agreement to Terms

By subscribing to HotelTechReport's Premium Membership, Member agrees to be bound by this Agreement. If Member does not agree with any part of this Agreement, Member must not subscribe to or use the Premium Membership services.

2. Membership Plans

Premium Membership is available in various plans, each offering different levels of benefits and services. Details of the specific features included in each plan are provided on the Company's website. The Company reserves the right to modify the benefits and pricing of these plans at any time.

3. Payment and Renewal

  • Quarterly Plans: Quarterly plans auto-renew and must be cancelled 30 days in advance of renewal.
  • Annual Plans: Annual plans are manually renewed with a renewal offer. Any vendor that does not accept the renewal offer by the end of their term a) forfeits said offer and b) will lose any credits unused during the previous membership period. All credits purchased as part of a discounted and bundled membership package including but not limited to lead credit, agency credit, posting credit and PPC credit do not rollover upon renewal and expire upon downgrade or renewal.

4. Membership Benefits

  • Access: Premium Membership benefits are available only to the Member and their designated team members. Benefits are not transferable to other parties.
  • Changes: The Company may modify or discontinue certain benefits at any time. Members will be notified of significant changes in advance.

5. Usage and Conduct

  • Compliance: Members must comply with all applicable laws and regulations while using the Premium Membership services.
  • Prohibited Activities: Members are prohibited from engaging in activities that harm or disrupt the HotelTechReport platform or other users, including but not limited to spamming, hacking, and distributing malware.

6. Intellectual Property

All content, tools, and resources provided as part of the Premium Membership are the intellectual property of the Company. Members are granted a limited, non-exclusive license to use these resources for their own business purposes. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or modification of these resources is prohibited. 

7. Limitation of Liability

The Company shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising out of or in connection with the Premium Membership services, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. The Company's total liability for any claims related to the Premium Membership services shall not exceed the amount paid by the Member for the membership during the 12 months preceding the claim.

8. Governing Law

This Agreement is governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of law principles.

9. Amendments

The Company reserves the right to amend this Agreement at any time. Members will be notified of any significant changes, and continued use of the Premium Membership services after such notification will constitute acceptance of the new terms.

10. Transferring Agency Credits

Gold and Platinum Premium Membership plans are steeply discounted, offering up to 55% off standard rates. Due to these substantial discounts, the following limitations apply:

  1. Usage Limitations: Packaged memberships may use no more than 30% of total package credits towards Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) campaigns and sponsored retargeting collectively.
  2. Non-Transferability: Agency credits and posting credits included in these specifically designed and discounted plans are non-transferable into pay-per-click credits or lead credits. These credits are to be used solely within the scope of the benefits provided in the respective membership plans.

11. Market-Based Repricing of Ad Products

HotelTechReport invests significant resources in traffic generation ranging from search engine optimization to paid traffic acquisition, technical advancements, software tools, email campaigns, and more. From time to time, HotelTechReport must reprice ad products based on shifting customer acquisition costs to match market conditions. This means that any usage of credits will be debited at the market rate at the time of use. For example, if the cost of an eblast campaign at the time of membership purchase is $7,000 and is repriced to $7,500 four months later to meet market conditions, and the Member uses those credits five months into the membership, that eblast will deduct $7,500 from the Member's agency services credit balance to reflect current market pricing. Repricing of ad products will occur no more than once per annum. 

12. Advertiser Guidelines and Policies

Members agree to abide by the Company's advertiser guidelines and policies. These guidelines and policies are designed to ensure a fair and transparent marketplace, and adherence to them is a condition of maintaining Premium Membership status.

13. Mergers and Acquisitions

In the event that a Member is acquired by another company, the acquiring company will retain the benefits of the Premium Membership for the duration of the current membership term. However, any credits associated with the Premium Membership may not be transferred to another company account.

 --

By subscribing to HotelTechReport's Premium Membership, Member acknowledges that they have read, understood, and agree to be bound by this Agreement.


Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
other product updates
3 years ago

Customize Press Release Share Images

If you've ever thought to yourself, "Hmmm...wouldn't it be nice to be able to customize the social share image for my press releases on HTR?" If so, you can thank Gary and Ruth from Duetto and Assil from Userguest for the feature request.


Related Article: How to Post a Press Release


Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
lead generationpromo opportunities
3 years ago

Migration From Add-Ons πŸ‘‰ Product Suites & Modules

Historically the way HTR has been structured is that in order to become discoverable in a category and generate leads, you needed to have a product listing/dedicated profile in that category.  If the product could be purchased as a standalone product then you would list is as such, and if it was a module/add-on for another core product--then you would list it as an add-on profile.


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.

Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
promo opportunities
3 years ago

πŸ“– HTR + Tripadvisor: 2022 Market Leaders Report and Market Map Are Live

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



Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
other product updates
3 years ago

New Site Navigation, Mega Menu & Vendor Toolbar

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.


Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
premiumlead generation
3 years ago

Added Visibility for Premium Members

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.

Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
rankings/ht scoreother product updates
3 years ago

New Sub-Categories Pages

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
Avatar of authorAdam Hollander
promo opportunitiesother product updates
3 years ago

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ Hospitality for Peace Campaign is Now Live!

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!

Avatar of authorAdam Hollander