Hotel review aggregator
TrustYou recently added to its client list another major hotel chain, and CEO
and co-founder Benjamin Jost said he could see the day when corporate travel
buyers also are on that list.
Accor this month selected
TrustYou to procure and monitor reviews for more than 3,300 of its hotels,
joining such multibrand hotel companies as Starwood Hotels & Resorts
Worldwide and Marriott International. "In a very short time period,
TrustYou set up hundreds of accounts, from corporate levels to single hotels,
for our extensive portfolio of brands around the world and our multilingual
staffs," according to Accor vice president of consumer intelligence Francois
Dung.
TrustYou is among the
largest of several companies to emerge in recent years designed to aid hotels
with reputation monitoring—a growing area of interest for hoteliers. A
TripAdvisor survey of more than 9,400 hotels this year showed 65 percent of hotel
managers in 2012 planned to monitor social media reviews of their properties.
Part of TrustYou's service
includes scouring social media and review sites—TripAdvisor, Yelp, Twitter,
Facebook and various blogs, to name a few—and developing for each hotel a
standardized "Trust Score." Reviews are weighted based on date
submitted. TrustYou also provides platforms for hotels to solicit reviews from
guests, Jost said.
The company monitors reviews
for about 400,000 hotels globally; about half of those have enough reviews to
generate a Trust Score.
Some large chains use the
scores to find top-performing hotels within a brand and root out hotels that
are not meeting brand standards. Some have even attached hotel manager bonuses
to the Trust Score performance, Jost said.
"We're just at the
beginning of something and still see in the market that not all hoteliers or
chains realize what's currently happening," he said. "This [online]
reputation basically influences the 99 percent of all the other consumers on
the Internet, who are making a booking decision based on reputation."
While hoteliers are
TrustYou's largest target audience, usage has been spreading to investors and
star-rating organizations in Germany and Switzerland that incorporate the data
into benchmarking processes. Jost said TrustYou has applicability to corporate
travel buyers as well.
"Anyone could sign up
with us to use the monitoring platform and could use it to benchmark with whom
they wanted to contract or not,” Jost said. "If you have negotiated rates
with a hotel, it makes sense to have a monitoring solution in place that shows
exactly how they're performing and what the reputation is for each individual
property.