2 years ago

New Department Hubs

Today we rolled out a full redesign of department pages transforming them into rich hubs of relevant content that enable hoteliers to (a) find relevant products and categories more easily and (b) discover new ideas and inspiration to optimize and invest more in their tech stacks.

What's New:

Simplified Nav Bar. Simplified nav now guides users to qualify into their department to more effectively guide them to relevant content.
New Department Hubs. New department hubs that serve as a jumping off point for discovery & inspiration to introduce users to relevant categories and products.
Goals-Based Collections. New goals-driven discovery via JTBD collections via a dynamic content series reorienting the site around objectives and goals (vs products and categories).
Success Stories. Relevant success stories are now highlighted on the new department pages to encourage FOMO-driven discovery that inspires hoteliers to adopt new tech by showing what others are doing (and they aren’t…)

Added Perks for Premium Members:

Boosted Visibility. Premium Members now get boosted visibility in the default sort on department hub pages in the products section as well as the 'users recommend' side bar as well as member success stories.

2 years ago

New & Improved Gold & Platinum Membership Plans

Along with the new year HTR is rolling out new and improved v4 Gold & Platinum Premium Membership plans that now include flexible HTR Agency credit that can be used towards advertising, sponsored content and demand generation campaigns.

What's New:

Gold Membership...now includes $10,000 worth of flexible HTR Agency credit
Platinum Membership...now includes $20,000 worth of flexible HTR Agency credit

Head to the Membership Portal in the vendor dashboard to learn more and upgrade

2 years ago

Manual Review Lookup for Basic Members

Are you a basic member who is running review campaigns and you want to check if a specific customer left a review but you don't have access to the Automated Review Manager? Now you can lookup reviews in the new review lookup feature

2 years ago

🪄 Update Hundreds of Old Reviews with a Single Click

Want to save a boatload of time updating old reviews to get fresh content on your profiles and boost your HT Score, rankings and visibility?

2 years ago

Introducing the Verified Case Study Builder

Verified Case Studies are a feature that enable hotel tech companies to quickly and easily build beautiful, engaging and trustworthy case studies that get promoted on Hotel Tech Report. Click here to learn more about creating verified case studies.

🎁 Members will be able to use posting credits included with your membership to create case studies and for non-members/basic members case studies will require the same amount of posting credits as a guest post but for the next two weeks so go ahead and give it a try!

2 years ago

Lead Instant Connect

Lead Instant Connect is a feature that allows you to set criteria for the types of leads that you want to target so that they'll get instantly accepted and forwarded into your CRM for immediate follow-up without delays or the need to manually check the dashboard. Click here to learn more about Instant Connect.

For Hoteliers. Deliver a better marketplace experience by enabling vendors to be more responsive and fulfill their requests faster
For Vendors. Reduce time-to-follow (directly correlated with success rates)

Since Instant Connect facilitates a better marketplace experience for hoteliers, ultimately the entire marketplace will shift fully to this model. That said, we're going to be rolling this out slowly to give vendors a chance to migrate over to the new system and optimize your lead targeting criteria. Additionally, vendors who accept leads via Instant Connect will receive increasing incentives over the first 6-months post-launch as a reward for delivering better, more responsive service to hoteliers placing requests through the platform. Below are the scheduled incremental increases in the discount amount for Instant Connect leads:

September '22: 15% off Instant Connect leads
October '22: 25% off Instant Connect leads
November '22: 30% off Instant Connect leads
December '22: 35% off Instant Connect leads
January '22: 40% off Instant Connect leads
February '23: 50% off Instant Connect leads

2 years ago

Avoid Missing Leads with 🔄 Auto-Reload

Auto-reload is a feature that automatically tops up your lead credit balance when it drops too low to make sure you don't miss leads that fit your criteria due to insufficient balance.

While auto-reload is an optional feature, if you choose not to enable it you do so knowing that it comes with the following risks:

Extra work and monitoring: Your team will need to manually monitor your balance closely on a daily basis to make sure you have sufficient to accept incoming leads
You may miss leads: If a lead comes in that fits your Instant Connect criteria but your account has insufficient balance, you will miss the lead even if you have Instant Connect enabled for that segment.

2 years ago

Added Perks for Vendors Who Provide Great Service to Hoteliers

Beginning September 1st, 2022 we are implementing two additional benefits for all leads accepted via Instant Connect that vendors can earn to align incentives and ensure that you are delivering responsive service to hoteliers and make sure that you're set up for success which include:

50% Discount...on all leads accepted via Instant Connect, meaning that you get 2x as many leads for the same price 💪
Earned access to the money-back guarantee...companies who follow HTR's Lead Program Guidelines to ensure that all leads are followed up with in a timely fashion and by defined best practices will earn the added benefit of being eligible for the HTR Money Back Guarantee. This benefit is extremely unique and is not offered by any other marketing or lead gen platforms (ie. Linkedin, Facebook, Google, etc) and as such it is one that companies earn into by providing a great experience to hoteliers.

Why is HTR offering these added benefits for vendors who follow best practices?

Over the past several months we have received complaints from hoteliers who place info requests on Hotel Tech Report that vendors take too long to reply which is why we built the Instant Connect feature to dramatically reduce time-to-followup and improve both the user experience for hoteliers as well as the vendor experience (time-to-followup is directly correlated with lead success rated).

Instant Connect facilitates a better marketplace experience for hoteliers, ultimately the entire marketplace will shift fully to this model. That said, we're going to be rolling this out slowly to give vendors a chance to migrate over to the new system and optimize your lead targeting criteria.

How much of a discount will vendors receive for Instant Connect leads?

Vendors who accept leads via Instant Connect will receive increasing incentives over the first 6-months post-launch as a reward for delivering better, more responsive service to hoteliers placing requests through the platform. Below are the scheduled incremental increases in the discount amount for Instant Connect leads:

September '22: 15% off Instant Connect leads
October '22: 25% off Instant Connect leads
November '22: 30% off Instant Connect leads
December '22: 35% off Instant Connect leads
January '22: 40% off Instant Connect leads
February '23: 50% off Instant Connect leads

What are the lead program guidelines that vendors need to follow in order to be eligible for these added benefits?

You can find more info in the Lead Program Guidelines documentation and below is a quick summary overview of the criteria:

2 years ago

Verified Case Studies Variable

As with all new variables, verified case studies will start out as having a nominal impact on the HT Score in their first year at roll out and will increase in importance over time to ensure that all vendors have time to prepare for the update.

How Do Case Studies Help Buyers?

Verified case studies are incredibly important towards HTR's mission of delivering an unmatched hotel technology search and selection experience for hoteliers around the world. It's also the first step towards increasing benefits based selling throughout the site to help hoteliers visualize and imagine the possibilities of leveraging digital products by seeing real examples of their peers who are using them and the outcomes they are achieving instilling urgency, trust and FOMO to drive adoption of tech in the global hotel industry.

Related: Why we build the verified case studies feature

Can Case Studies Determine the Leader in a Category?

While case studies are a nominal part of the overall HT Score (<3%), they can be the determining factor in a close race where two companies have maxed out most other variables similar to how this can happen with Google's Search Algorithm. Here is an example of how this can happen:

Example Scenario and Analogy of Google Page Speed Algorithm Update

Imagine that 2x websites with amazing and mostly similar domain authority each have an excellent blog post about 'gardening tulips'
Imagine blog post A consistently ranks ahead of blog post B but has really poor page speed and user experience metrics.
When Google rolls out the user experience update, despite ranking better across other metrics, post B could move into the lead.

If you notice your rank change in a category where you have close competitors in the rankings this can be easily resolved by just making sure that you at least have some verified case studies published for buyers.

2 years ago

🇮🇱 HTR Is Now Available in 6 New Languages!

With audience growth continuing to pick up globally HTR has recently rolled out native translated versions of the site in 6 new languages including: Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew 🙌