Today we rolled out a full redesign to the Review Form which included several functional new elements to help improve conversion as well as a full aesthetic redesign including: 

• Redesign: Ground up redesign of the legacy review form
• Verification Options: Social auth verification to make verification even simpler and reduce the need for users to click a verification link sent to their email to boost conversion without losing verification.  We also incorporated magic link for users who don't have an approved professional social login available (Google, Linkedin or Microsoft) to use for verification
• New Start Page: New start page to help mitigate mixups if you send a partner recc link to a hotel customer or vice versa (ex. https://hoteltechreport.com/review/mews)
• Use Case Selection: Rather than ask users which products they use, we instead ask them about the use cases they'd like to review (aka. 'For which purposes do you use {product}' to improve accuracy of product selection and the resulting review's relevance to a specific product and its respective use cases
• Hotel Lookup + Auto-fill: We integrated the dynamic hotel lookup field into the review form to help save time and reduce form fields by pre-filling hotel attributes for users including: region, hotel size and hotel type

As of July 24, 2025 HTR became aware of an bug with our 3rd party email integration provider Nylas caused by an outage with Google's Gmail APIs.  

• Status                     🔴 In Progress
• Feature Impact      Email integration 
• Users Impacted     Users who have connected a Gmail account via the feature
• Scope of Issue       In select cases where the Gmail API returned errors, its possible                                  that emails were sent 2 or 3 times to a user when they were                                        retried.  Our estimate is that 20-30% of users were impacted

Who is impacted? 

Only select users who currently have implemented the email integration feature and connected a Gmail account (Outlook and other providers do not have this same issue Learn more).  If you want to confirm impact you can go to the sent mail tab of your Gmail account that you integrated and search for the subject line of the campaign and then see if any users were sent duplicative emails.  

Context of what happened

On July 20, 2025 a client reported that they had sent a review campaign using the email integration and that some users were reporting that they had received duplicates of certain emails.  

Since emails sent via this integration get sent triggered via the Nylas API and then sent through your own email (Gmail, Outlook, etc), HTR does not have visibility into the emails that are sent.  As such, we quickly acted to implement the following: 

• Refactor the feature to queue up each email as its own job (instead of queueing up a campaign with multiple emails batched) to ensure that if a single email event fails, when the job retries it then it only retries that email (instead of the entire campaign)
• Implement webhooks from the Nylas API to receive and log a response to each email event that we sent to gain visibility into which emails sent, which returned an error and which were retried.

After implementing these changes and gaining visibility into the errors we found that they continued to persist so we became fairly certain that these were caused by the Nylas API and went to reach out to their customer support to then find in their user forums a discussion thread about this being a known recent issue as well as an active bug report on their status page detailing the root cause of the issue which is in reality a bug with Google's Gmail APIs.

What are we doing about it? 

For users who have the Nylas email integration feature enabled but don't currently have an active campaign running...we  disconnected all user accounts who had integrated their email and disabled the Nylas email integration feature in the HTR dashboard to ensure that new campaigns won't be sent until this issue is resolved.

For users who have an active campaign running...we are reaching out to you individually with an update and next steps so we can keep active campaigns running until completion and then disable the feature once they are complete.

As noted above, the root cause of the issue is an error in Google's Gmail APIs which Nylas is waiting to hear back from Google's customer support about (you can subscribe to updates here).  We are now monitoring the status of this option issue between Google and Nylas awaiting a resolution.

Our dev team is investigating options available to implement safeguards to ensure that even if Google's Gmail API or Nylas' API have errors, that we have controls in place to prevent them from impacting campaigns sent using this integration.  We are also investigating alternative email integration APIs on the market as a backup in case we deem Nylas' tool not to be stable enough to re-activate.

If you have any users who have reached out frustrated about this issue please note that: 

1. The biggest impact a single user would experience is just receiving a duplicate of a review request email 
2. If you would like our team to reach out to impacted users to explain the issue that Google and Nylas and by effect HTR, we are happy to so please reach out via the live chat on site

The next time you login to the HTR vendor dashboard you'll notice that it has a new look and feel.  The majority of this redesign is aesthetic and simply to make the dashboard more intuitive and easier to navigate.  

TL;DR

• The vendor dashboard has a new look and feel
• The structure is the same, you can find everything in the same place as it was before
• A few updates to keep in mind
  • a) New layout for the profile editor
  • b) Redesigned membership portal with all new membership plans
  • c) Leads, PPC and Agency Campaigns tabs have been consolidated under the new Lead Gen tab

This month we rolled out updates that enable you to promote more than just point solutions via the PPC auction.  

TL;DR: Department Auction Updates

• Platform vs Point Solution.  You can now toggle on Platform Promotion in the department auctions to advertise your full suite of products across department pages—perfect for vendors offering an integrated tech stack.
• New Featured Products Accordion.  Department auctions now have a new featured products accordion placement to highlight the top 6 bidders in the auction.
• Top Bidder Visibility. The top bidder in each department auction now gets enhanced visibility with an expanded state that shows large product imagery, product capabilities and more to drive even more visibility, brand awareness, clicks and performance.

In addition to these department auction updates, the Newsletter Auction now has its own tab in the PPC dashboard to make it easier to find and manage your newsletter campaigns.

Ever wish it was easier to monitor how your PPC campaigns are pacing relative to your target budget?

The new budget pacer will monitor and forecast your month end spend pace and compare it to your budget.

• Pacing behind? The Budget Utilization Alert will appear to let you know that your campaign is forecasted to under deliver (ie. based on current bids you won't be able to deploy your full budget)
• Pacing ahead? The Low Budget Alert will appear to give you a forecast of what you'd need to increase your monthly budget to in order to prevent your budget from running out mid-month and your campaigns getting disabled

Budget pacing alerts instantly do the math on the fly for you so you can just monitor your dashboard to quickly check in on how your campaigns are pacing relative to your budget and gives you actionable tips of how to optimize your bids and budget to generate the most amount of clicks and leads.

Since launching the new dynamic PPC auction for the Home Page + Newsletter placement (Jan '25 Update) , we have had lots of vendors inquiring about just advertising in one or the other.  

As such, we have decided to split these into two distinct auctions allowing advertisers to be able to bid on each separately.

If you had an active bid in the Home Page + Newsletter auction your settings (bid amount and tracking link) have been applied across both of the new auctions to ensure that you continue generating visibility across each.

In addition to splitting out the auctions to make each available individually for enhanced targeting, the Weekly Newsletter is now available for fixed price sponsorships.  Single sends and discounted 4x packs are available which you can learn more about below.

Learn more:

👉 Home Page Auction

👉 Weekly Newsletter Auction

In addition to the core placements for each of the PPC auctions, top bidders will now get an additional boost to performance via additional placements to feature your brand and product and drive even more impressions, clicks and leads to the top bidders in each respective auction.

• Home Page + Newsletter Auction performance boosters 👉 Branded banner + newsletter logo sponsor
• Department Auction performance boosters:  👉 Nav bar and related articles, categories and profiles
• Category Auctions performance boosters 👉 Related comparisons, alternatives, articles and profiles

Today we rolled out a full redesign of the UI and functionality of the software recommendations quiz giving it not only an entirely new look and feel but it now fully integrates AI to help hoteliers save time and make better decisions.

✨ New AI Features

• AI Powered Fit Score: The quiz is now powered by the same AI Fit score algorithm as the Tech Stack Audit tool analyzing millions of data points in seconds to determine each product's fit for a specific hotel.
• AI Content Summarization: AI scans, analyzes and summarizes thousands of reviews, expert recommendations and content to serve up summaries for hoteliers with snippets, citations and sentiment analysis serving as the ultimate tech tools research assistant. 
• AI Topic & Sentiment Analysis: Drill deeper into each recommendation with topic and sentiment analysis to find out what real users from the leading hotel companies mention most about each recommendation while also being able to make more accurate comparisons between products along key buying criteria including: functionality, integrations, support, value/ROI and ease of use.

Since we rolled out AI Enhanced Company Descriptions a few months back we've had several vendors reach out asking how this is generated, what info it pulls from and how it works--which is why we added the new sources and citations element to help both vendors (and hoteliers) understand how this AI generated product description is being generated.