Twice a year HTR assesses the categories on the site to determine if there are new categories that need to be added based on the evolving hotel tech stack as well as prune old categories that are no longer relevant or a good fit.  In our end of year analysis we determined that the IT & Building Management category on the site was confusing to users and was serving as a catch all for categories of the tech stack that really didn't belong together.  

As such, we have decided to deprecate this as a department from the site beginning early January 2024.

What will happen to the sub-categories within IT & Building Management department when the department is deprecated from the site in January?

Each sub-category was assessed individually to determine the best approach for how to handle.   Here are the final conclusions: 

1. Hotel Maintenance Software 👉 moved into Operations
2. Payment Processing Tools  👉 moved into Operations
3. Cyber Security & Fraud Prevention  👉 moved into Operations
4. Pre-Opening & Renovations Software 👉 moved into Operations
5. Energy Management Solutions  👉 moved into Operations
6. Parking Management Software  👉 moved into Operations
7. Digital Signage  👉 moved into Guest Experience
8. Hotel Wi-Fi  👉 moved into Guest Experience
9. Guest Room Management 👉 moved into Guest Experience
10. Marketplaces & Integrators  👉 deprecated from the site fully (details below)
11. Metasearch & Ad Tech 👉 Hotel Advertising Solutions

Why was the Marketplaces & Integrators category fully deprecated?

one such category which was the Marketplaces & Integrators category which had several issues that lead to its deprecation from the site beginning in 2024.  The core issues with the category were: 

1. Inaccurate listings: Of the 27 products listed in the category, only two of them were true standalone solutions that were listed correctly as such.  The 25 others did not qualify as true standalone solutions and were therefore listed inaccurately in a misleading way to users.  Instead, these solutions were add-on modules that were essentially just integrations of another product.  For example, the Apaleo App Store was one such product listed in the category.  The problem is that this a hotel cannot leverage the Apaleo App Store without using Apaleo's PMS and therefore not a true standalone integrations solution and should have been listed instead as an add-on module of the Apaleo PMS.  Additionally, if add-ons that faciliate product integrations could be listed as a standalone product then every company would technically have an integrations product which just doesn't make sense and isn't helpful to users on the site.
2. No search demand: In addition to the inaccurate listings issue mentioned above, we also analyzed search demand for this category and found that there is not sufficient demand for a standalone integrations solution to justify having a standalone category for this in the marketplace.  As such, we have decided to deprecate this category.

What if my company had a product in the category? What about our reviews?

If you are one of the 27 companies that had a product listing in the Marketplaces & Integrators category, two things happened when your profile was deprecated along with the category to preserve your content:

1. Product Migration: Your product was migrated from a standalone product in the category to instead become an add-on module of the core product that it was a part of to more accurately reflect the nature of the toolset for hoteliers browsing the site so they can learn about this as a capability of your product even though it is not a standalone solution.  For example, the Apaleo App Store standalone product profile was deprecated and an add-on module was created for the Apaleo App Store within the Apaleo PMS profile. You can update the description of this module via the profile editor of your vendor dashboard.
2. Review Migration: In order to ensure that no customer reviews were lost, HTR automatically migrated any reviews that your company had solely for that product to add them to the core product that the module has been added to.  For example, if the Apaleo App Store had 10 reviews, these reviews were migrated to the Apaleo PMS product profile since the Apaleo App Store is in reality, an add-on/module of the Apaleo PMS.

On Tuesday May 31 we are going to be migrating the entire HTR app (website, vendor dashboard and admin panel) to all new infrastructure along with upgrading over a dozen libraries which is a massive project that we have been working on over the last 7-months.

While we've tested the new infrastructure extensively in a staging environment, given the scope of the project it is inevitable for small issues and edge cases to arise which we'll be logging here to keep clients up to date. 

Please let us know if you run into any issues that are not logged below so we can work to reproduce and resolve them as quickly as possible.

🙏 We appreciate your patience and understanding and hope to have all issues resolved by Friday June 2nd

HTR recently became aware of an edge case related to the mapping of country codes to regions that was introduced along with the deployment of the Poseidon Algorithm update that we are working on a patch for that will be deployed in the next couple of days (expected go live week of 11/22).

• Impact: Minor.  Impacted only select countries and select reviews.  Some companies may have experienced slightly deflated region and country bonuses if they had reviews from select countries that had mapping issues when the user selected their location via the Google Places API.
• Issue: Edge case identified where certain country codes were not mapped properly to their region and/or country as it pertains to the calculation in the HT Score algorithm related to global reach bonuses.

What happened?

HTR typically pulls country data from the popular Google Places API (excluding mainland China reviews); however, a select group of countries and regions were found to be “unmatched” in the lookup function causing some vendors to experience artificially deflated country counts in their HTScore indexes.

Which countries were identified to have potential mapping issues?

Below is a list of countries that had anomalous entries in the database and were updated in the lookup function.  One such example is that 517 reviews in the database were classified as originating in ‘Czechia’ while the HTScore algorithm lookup function was searching for the term “Czech Republic” as defined by the Google Places API.

Please note that only a fraction of cases were impacted by these mapping issues in these countries so just because a country is listed does not mean all reviews from that country were not mapped correctly.

List of impacted regions:

• 'Virgin Islands
•  'United States of America'
•  'United Kingdom'
•  'Turks and Caicos Islands'
•  'Tanzania'
•  'Spain'
•  'Seychelles'
•  'Saint Martin (French part)'
•  'Saint Barthélemy'
•  'Russian Federation'
•  'Poland'
•  'Norway'
•  'Netherlands'
•  'Netherlands Antilles'
•  'Myanmar'
•  'Morocco'
•  'Maldives'
•  'Macedonia'
•  'Luxembourg'
•  'Korea
•  'Italy'
•  'Ireland'
•  'Greece'
•  'Germany'
•  'Gambia'
•  'France'
•  'Finland'
•  'Czech Republic'
•  'Congo (Kinshasa)'
•  'China'
•  'Belgium'
•  'Bahamas'
•  'Australia'
•  'Austria'
•  'Switzerland'
•  'Brunei Darussalam'
•  'Hungary'
•  'United Arab Emirates'
•  'Estonia'
•  'Fiji'
•  'Indonesia'
•  'Sweden'
•  'Cyprus'

Who was impacted and what was the impact?

Most vendors will not notice any difference in their scores or the scores of other products in their categories.  That said, vendors with reviews from the following countries MAY have been impacted; however, not necessarily as these were anomalies and in many cases the review countries were properly classified.  Impacted vendors may have experienced an increase in countries and regions served which would in many cases increase HTScores from understated scores previously visible on the platform.  These changes are extremely rare and likely unnoticeable but some vendors may notice a several point increase in scores as the algorithm begins detecting their accurate country and region counts once the mapping patch goes live.

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.