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Today we rolled out several updates that aim to make profiles more helpful for buyers.  These updates come as a result of several feature requests from both hoteliers in the community as well as vendors and serve to make profiles easier to scan, digest and understand.

Feature Requests from Vendors 👉 Profile Enhancements

1. See review counts by filters
2. Review tags for country, size and type to more easily find relevant reviews
3. Increased visibility for partner recommendations by moving them out of a tabbed view within the reviews section into their own new dedicated section
4. Add-on modules have been separated into their own dedicated section on profiles

Feature Requests from Users (hoteliers) 👉 Geographic Relevance Indicators

1. Review segmentation and geographic popularity of a product by country
2. Alerts to warn users if a given product may not be popular or serve their country 
   1. Alert #1: No reviews from the user's country
   2. Alert #2: More than 50%+ of a product's reviews are from the same country
3. Ability to find relevant reviews with country flags on reviews
4. Filter reviews by country

This month all HotelTechAwards participants get up to 10x free case studies as a perk of participation ($5,000 value). Not only does this help you share your company's latest success stories with HTR's 300k+ hoteliers that visit the site each month but it also ensures a level playing field in the competition so that it doesn't cost more to share your success stories (one of the variables in the HT Score). 

How It Works

1. Publish a case study to the site between 10/1/23 - 10/31/23
2. Complete the case study refund request form for the case study that you published once its been completed and posted to the site

More info

• How to Build a Stunning & Impactful Case Study in Under 5-minutes
• Why We Built the Verified Case Study Builder
• Section-by-Section Walk Through
• Get Inspired by 300+ Case Study Examples

Today we rolled out a full redesign of the hosted ebook landing pages to help elevate the promotion of Premium Member hosted reports and sponsored buyers guides and boost landing page conversion to generate more downloads.

• View Premium Member hosted reports library
• View Sponsored Buyer's Guide library

Today we rolled out two new features to allow Premium Members to add extra product-level branding for branded profile banners and logos.

• Custom Product Banners (available w/all Premium Plans): Make your profiles catch the attention of visitors faster to more effectively market your products and boost conversion by replacing your company's generic branded banner with custom product specific profile banners
• Custom Product Logos (available w/Gold & Platinum Plans): Additional branding to enable more precise marketing of subsidiaries or sub-brands that are housed under the same umbrella/parent company 

Several companies have requested an easier way to view, manage and update partner recommendations via the vendor dashboard which is why HTR just rolled out a new dedicated tab within the vendor dashboard where you can: 

• View which partners have left you a recommendation
• View recommendation details
• Recommend your partner back
• Filter by product to see product-specific recommendations
• Update partner recommendations with 1-click to get them to count as fresh (similar to review updating)

Today we rolled out a redesign of the pricing tab within the profile editor based on feedback from both sides of the community (hoteliers and vendors).  Complete the pricing section for each of your products to help pique buyer interest to convert into a price quote and for a quick boost to your HT Score.

TL;DR

• For Hoteliers.  One of the most commonly requested pieces of information that hoteliers ask for most is pricing.  Hoteliers constantly reach out asking if we can obtain relative pricing benchmarks to help them better understand which products fit their budget and how they benchmark relative to each other
• For Vendors.  On the other hand, the feedback that we've gotten from most vendors is that they want pricing discretion and don't necessarily want their pricing publicly available (as evidenced by most vendors not having pricing on their websites...).  This pricing UI update allows vendors to report an estimated price range (without any add-on modules or integration fees) for benchmarking purposes while also maintaining pricing discretion (by not having to publicly state a specific price or number)
• Our Solution.  We created a way for vendors to share a rough pricing estimate for their base product for a single 100-room hotel (with no add-ons or integration fees) and then we benchmark this relative to other vendors in the category without disclosing pricing publicly
• Impact on Rankings.  Pricing information continues to be part of the profile completeness HT Score variable and does impact rankings the same as it always has so it's important to make sure to fill in this section of the profile editor to make sure you don't lose points or have any negative impact to your rankings

Since the rollout of Instant Connect last year, the majority of vendors on the platform have migrated to accepting leads in real-time based on targeting criteria reducing their time-to-followup and cutting their CPL in half.  With vendors now migrated to the Instant Connect system, we've had several requests for the ability to automatically decline leads that don't match your criteria which is why today we're rolling out the new Auto-Decline feature.  Here's how it works:

1. Enable Instant Connect in a category and set your targeting criteria
2. Scroll to the bottom of the settings 
3. Select 'yes' if you would like to automatically decline leads that do not match your targeting criteria. 

A couple things to note:

1. Once you enable auto-decline, you'll no longer get notifications about leads that don't match your lead targeting criteria
2. Once you decline a lead you won't be able to go back and change your mind (so make sure to only auto-decline segments that you absolutely cannot service)

Today HTR rolled out a full redesign of the Reputation Report Card aimed at making it simpler to identify how each of your products scores along each of the four facets of the ranking algorithm (eg. customer ratings, partner ecosystem, customer centricity and staying power).

• Drill into each section of the HT Score in more detail
• Understand each of the drivers of the HT Score ranking algorithm
• Highlight opportunities for improvement in real time to optimize your rankings and visibility

If you've competed in the HotelTechAwards in the past, this year is going to be nearly identical to last year.  Having said, that, there are a couple of updates and improvements that we've made this year that are worth noting that fall into three buckets: 

1. New Perks: Thousands of dollars in perks and benefits for participants to help make running your awards campaign a breeze.
2. Product Updates: New features that we've rolled out to simplify managing your team's awards campaign
3. Algorithm Updates: Updates to the HT Score ranking algorithm since last year to make the HT Score more dynamic that impact this year's competition.

I. New Perk for Participants: Free Case Studies During the Month of October

As in past year's all companies who compete in the annual HotelTechAwards get free access to the Automated Review Manager for 30-days (September 1 - September 30) to kick start your campaign.  This year we are also going to be adding a new perk worth thousands of dollars which is that all participants will now get 10x free case studies ($5,000 value) to utilize during the month of October.   We will be sending out a reminder notification about this in October but for those of you who like to plan ahead...plan on focusing on posting case studies in October. How it works: 

1. Post a case study during the month of October
2. Once it has been verified, fill in the refund form here by October 30, 2024 to get up to 10x case studies refunded in full 

II. Relevant Product Updates

1. Redesigned Reputation Report Card: Ground up redesign of the Reputation Report Card to make it easier than ever to see what will make the most impact and move the needle most to optimize your HT Score and focus your awards campaign on the action items that set your company up for success.
2. Company-Level Integrations: Integrations have been refactored from the product to company level making it easier to list and verify your integrations without having to relist or audit duplicate integrations for each of your products.
3. Partner Recommendations Tab + Updating Feature: In order for companies to more easily manage, collect and update recommendations from partners, HTR will be rolling out a tab in the dashboard dedicated to partner recommendations (instead of the small report card modal from past years)

III. HT Score & Rankings

1. Profile Completeness Variable: The profile completeness score will evaluate each profile along with pieces of key information that buyers look for which include: capabilities, screenshots, pricing, features, profile freshness.
2. Trending Variable:  The purpose of the trending score is to help hoteliers identify products that are trending in the market which is measured by assessing the following questions.
3. Static Variables Update: All HT Score variables migrated from static (cumulative over time) to dynamic (time-based variables and calculations to enhance relevance and weight recent content more heavily)

Reminder: For companies who are looking to compete in the overall platform awards, please rememeber that you do not need to register seperately for this competition BUT YOU DO NEED TO BE REGISTERED AND COMPETING IN EACH OF YOUR RESPECTIVE PRODUCT CATEGORIES.