Introducing the world’s largest guest feedback platform
The eTourism solution TrustYou supports tourism organizations with a feedback platform solution to provide travelers with better services and products by monitoring, surveying and acting on the feedback of their guests. This in the best case, results in better performance, travel experience and thus higher revenue. In times of information overload within digital spaces, it is challenging to compile lots of opinions. Collecting this information through the web is beyond any one person’s capacity. Therefore, TrustYou collects and analyzes hundreds of millions of opinions across the online market, which the hotel than can use to positively influence travelers’ decisions through right marketing arrangements. (Johnson, n.d., p.9)
How does TrustYou work?
TrustYou was founded in 2009 by Benjamin Jost, headquartered in Munich, Germany. It was found out, that people are regularly willing to spend large amounts of money for their vacations, directly connected to their perception of quality about service, product and performance. Looking at a study carried out by TrustYou, 76% of travelers reported that they would be willing to pay more for a hotel with a higher review score (Ady and Quadi-Felitti, 2014, p.7-9). For this reason, the customer has become a co-designer in this process, whereas TrustYou forwards the feedback from the end-customer to the hotel marketing manager. With the structured overview of reviews in the platform, the hotel can improve where there is a need to improve, to influence the customer journey, booking behavior and to reach a better ranking in the end.
Looking behind the technology
The company has a unique semantic engine that analyzes online feedback content on travel sites, including Google, Kayak, Expedia, Booking.com and Hotels.com (TrustYou, 2020 c). Their own algorithm automatically detects, collects, understands, scores and ranks the content to the respective tourism organizations (Willmore, 2018). TrustYou improves travelers’ experiences by providing intermediaries like OTA’s and destination managers or suppliers, such as for over 500.000 hotels worldwide, accommodations, restaurants with structured data in terms of Meta-Reviews, Guest Messaging service, Guest surveys and reputation analytics (Johnson, n.d., p.9). Since 2008, TrustYou has collected and analyzed all over guest reviews and has built up one of the industry’s largest and most elaborate feedback databases from which hotels can benefit in various ways. (TrustYou, 2020 d)
The technology behind the smart system is called “natural language processing” (NLP). For all languages available, there is a mechanism to group those words into the hotel categories. A set of these hotel categories (mainly the main ones) are used for the Meta-Review API. Through Meta-review API, booking sites and meta-search engines, TrustYou can display these data on their website. (Lilleberg, 2020) The data for the Meta comes from their database where all hotels are listed. In contrast to their API, TrustYou’s Meta-review is updated every Wednesday. If a client purchases an API, they can customize this raw data. All of their data partners (e.g. Google), have access to their Meta-Review API and thus the raw review data. This means that they have the right to decide on how they want to show the data on their website and how often they want to receive the updates. (Lilleberg, 2020)
TrustYou is a growing enterprise. Its success is based on high-quality standards and a great team behind, combined with a smart digital solution. Since 2009, TrustYou has been a major player for guest feedback. Developing from a startup among the first to collect reviews from across the web and deliver actionable insights for the tourism industry to a dominating well-known name. Now and in the future.
References
Ady, M. and Quadi-Felitti, D. (2014, July) The Effect of Reviews on Hotel Conversion Rates and Pricing pdf. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from TrustYou, p. 7-9
Johnson, N. (n.d.). Consumer Research Emphasizes Importance of Online Feedback Management pdf. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from TrustYou, p. 9
Lilleberg, L. (2020, March 23). TrustYou. (C. Werner, Interviewer)
Trustyou. (2020 a). Homepage. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from TrustYou: https://www.trustyou.com/de/
TrustYou. (2020 b). About us. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from TrustYou: https://www.trustyou.com/de/about
TrustYou. (2020 c). Our Partners. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from TrustYou: https://www.trustyou.com/de/partners
TrustYou. (2020 d) Review Insight Report Global 2020 pdf. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from TrustYou, p. 12
Willmore, S. (2018, February 14). Can hoteliers trust TrustYou? Retrieved March 19, 2020, from Travel Daily (TD): https://www.traveldailymedia.com/can-hoteliers-trust-trustyou/
Picture
TrustYou. (2013, January 21). Logos & Images. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from TrustYou: https://www.trustyou.com/de/press/logos-images