The HT Score is the ranking algorithm that's used to rank products relative within each category on the site. As you improve your HT Score, your rankings will improve which generates more more visibility and leads and creates a virtuous cycle that drives the most value and visibility to the products that come most highly recommended by hoteliers.
1. Intro to the HT Score
Similar to how you might search for best hotels in Paris on Tripadvisor and you are likely to surface several very different options until you start applying filters like price, star rating or amenities, the HT Score is intended to create a baseline overall comparison within a given category based on which solutions come most recommended by hoteliers.
Needless to say there is obviously no single best product for all hotels the same way there isn't a single best hotel in Paris which is why all throughout the site users are encouraged to leverage filters, data and personalized recommendations to find solutions tailored to their unique characteristics, needs and preferences.
While popularity tends to be strong indicator of fit when it comes to segment based rankings (ie. most popular for resorts, most popular in Europe, most popular for small hotels, etc) it doesn't work well for overall rankings within a category because it just becomes a list of the biggest companies.
That's where the HT Score comes in. Ultimately the goal of the HT Score is to productize the criteria that buyers assess when researching hotel tech products to be able to compare and benchmark products within a category regardless of their customer segmentation, product functionality or price point.
The REVPAR Analogy
The same way hotels use REVPAR to be able to compare hotels of different classes, sizes and regions, the HT Score does the same thing but to compare tech products within a category that may have different target markets, price points and feature functionality.
Where REVPAR uses rate and occupancy to create a blended normalizing comparison metric, the HT Score's key drivers are review quantity and quality (aka. average ratings)
CRITERIA GROUP | VARIABLES | IMPORTANCE |
Customer Ratings & ReviewsHow highly do users recommend your product? | Ratings Score, Review Volume Score, Share of Voice, Review quality/depth, Review Recency, Success Stories, Customer Advocates | ⚫️⚫️⚫️⚫️⚫️ |
Partner EcosystemHow highly do tech partners recommend your company? | Partner Recommendations, Integrations (quantity and quality) | ⚫️⚫️⚫️⚪️⚪️ |
Customer CentricityHow customer centric is your organization? | Customer support, review consistency, profile completeness | ⚫️⚫️⚪️⚪️⚪️ |
Reach, Staying Power & ResourcesHow extensive is your company's reach & resourcing? | Geographic reach (countries and regions), staying power, company resources, trending score | ⚫️⚫️⚪️⚪️⚪️ |
Want to stay up to date with the latest scoring changes? View HT Score change log
2. Scoring Variables
The most heavily weighted variables in the HotelTechScore algorithm are customer ratings and reviews (see pie chart below) which is why these are so critical and by far the most important metric to focus on (quantity of reviews, average ratings and review recency). That said, there are also over a dozen other buyer decision criteria variables and quality signals that the algorithm analyzes including company staying power, integrations ecosystem and customer support that fall into the four groups below.
2a. Customer Ratings
VARIABLE | DESCRIPTION |
Profile Trustworthiness | Research has shown that users begin to actually trust a business' profile on review sites when they have at least 25 reviews. Reach this milestone to earn a trustworthy profile and get ranked within your category to drive more visibility and leads. |
Review Volume (Category Threshold) | The category review threshold essentially says, for relevant products within your category with sufficient feedback, what is the average number of reviews for top rated products and have you met it? If so, you get full points for this criteria. If not, you will receive a penalty for not having a sufficient amount of reviews to be fairly compared with other top products in the category. You can see the minimum review threshold for a given product right when you login to your vendor dashboard (👀 See in dashboard)
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Ratings Score (average ratings/satisfaction) | The HT Score aggregates your average ratings for likelihood to recommend, ease of use, customer support and return on investment which are each weighted equally. The better your averages, the higher your HT Score. You can see your product's average satisfaction ratings in the vendor dashboard across Likelihood to Recommend (out of 10), Ease of Use (out of 5), Customer Support (out of 5), ROI (out of 5) |
The SaaS world changes on a week-to-week basis so a review from last year likely does not give consumers an accurate representation of today's product, service and company. To ensure that companies have fresh content for users, an alert is posted on profiles who have fewer than 20 reviews in the trailing 6-months (~2 reviews/month on average). To make sure your score isn't impacted, make sure you have at least 20 reviews in the trailing 6-month period (~1-2 reviews/month on average) (👀 See in dashboard) | |
Share of Voice (aka. client bias) | The Share of Voice variable identifies how many unique clients/hotels a product has received feedback from. This helps to identify potential client selection bias (aka. cherry picking) that can arise if a vendor is strategically only asking for feedback from a select number of clients versus reaching out to their full install base. Additionally, having a small number of hotels who have recommended a product relative to other providers in the category can be an indicator that the product is relatively new in market and is not yet well established which is an indicator of potential risk for buyers. (👀 See in dashboard) |
Companies that build outstanding products that customers love develop strong communities of passionate customer advocates who have insightful feedback about the product and take the time to engage in ways to support the development, growth and success of products they love. In-depth reviews are an indicator of customer engagement and serve to provide more value to users by painting clear user scenarios and pros and cons to help buyers on HTR better understand a given product. For these reasons, in-depth reviews are factored in as a weighting variable (relative to review depth from peers in the same category) and an indicator of customer engagement. Earn more points as you get more in-depth reviews relative to your peers. (👀 See in dashboard) | |
Verified success stories help hoteliers visualize and better understand the benefits and use case of utilizing a given product by showcasing real examples of peers who are using it and the outcomes they achieved which provides buyers with useful information to help them make more informed decisions. |
2b. Partner Ecosystem
VARIABLE | DESCRIPTION |
Partner recommendations are a strong quality indicator and vote of confidence from industry experts who can speak to the product, team and company. (👀 See in dashboard) | |
Integrations are one of the most critical elements to increase tooling efficiency, time savings and the ability to leverage data while reducing redundancies, manual entry and disparate data. (👀 See in dashboard) | |
Analyzes how many top rated vendors your product integrates with relative to other providers in your category. The algorithm assesses the average HT Scores and ratings of all of your verified integration partners to come up with an ecosystem quality score. Products with the highest quality app ecosystems not only have a higher probability of being able to effectively service more users in the global market place, but ecosystem health also serves as an indicator of engineering resources, company reputation and ability to deliver a more seamless customer experience through a holistically integrated tech stack of world class products. (👀 See in dashboard) |
2c. Customer Centricity
VARIABLE | DESCRIPTION |
Customer support is one of the most critical decision factors when hoteliers are selecting new vendors but it's also one of the most difficult to assess in the buying process. Companies who have invested into tools and processes to help their clients succeed and opened to achieved HTR's GCSC Customer Support Certification earn additional points. (👀 See in dashboard) | |
Customer Centric Processes (aka. Review Consistency) | Collecting organic and consistent reviews over time is an indicator that customer feedback is at the root of a company's culture. As a result, companies who show stable review collection earn additional points for customer centricity. Try to embed organic review collection processes into your customer journey (view tips) to collect more organic reviews and stabilize your review volumes over time. (👀 See in dashboard) |
Profile Completeness (NEW) | Profiles are only as valuable to buyers as the content that your team adds to them. Adding high quality and accurate info to help buyers better understand a company's products is an indicator of transparency and customer centricity. The profile completeness score analyzes each product to determine if it has the critical product info that buyers look for:
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2d. Reach & Staying Power
VARIABLE | DESCRIPTION |
Geographic Reach (regions + countries) | Scaling to, and maintaining, a global presence is resource intensive and requires strong product market fit, experienced leadership and strong business fundamentals each of which are strong success indicators. Additionally, Hotel Tech Report's audience is global and therefore the probability of being a good fit for the average user is higher for companies with a global presence who are able to service a global client base. Get 5+ reviews from more regions and countries relative to other companies in your category to earn more global reach points. |
Staying Power (years in business) | Relative assessment of company's longevity and staying power using time in business as a proxy. When choosing technology vendors, hoteliers are looking for a partner that will be around for the long haul. More years in business is a strong indicator of a stable and sustainable company that will be around for more to come. |
Resources (team headcount) | Relative assessment of headcount as a proxy for company resources available to invest in their product, R&D, customer support and growth. Since many companies' funding rounds are not publicly available or they are funded by cashflow, HTR uses headcount as a proxy for resource availability. |
Trending Score (NEW) | The trending score helps hoteliers identify products that are trending in the market to uncover products that are gaining momentum and being more widely adopted and talked about in the industry which is an indicator of success and future staying power. (view update)
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FAQs
What is the HT Score?
What is the HT Score?
The HotelTechScore (aka. HT Score) is HTR’s proprietary ranking algorithm that is used to assess a company's reputation on HotelTechReport.com and in the global marketplace in order which is used by HTR's audience of 140,000+ monthly hoteliers to save time in the research process and compare vendors.
The goal of the HT Score is to productize the factors that a smart hotel tech buyer would research in order to compare vendors along key criteria and to create an accurate and fair ranking system with the primary driver being reputation, reviews and customer feedback.
Similar to how Google's search algorithm is constantly incorporating new variables to improve the search experience and deliver better results for searchers, HTR continues to add new variables based on publicly available information and proprietary data in the HTR platform in order to assess and compare products on the platform including:
How is the HT Score similar to REVPAR?
How is the HT Score similar to REVPAR?
The easiest way to think about the HT Score is that its like REVPAR for hotels but instead of rate and occupancy as the core variables, the HT Score has review quantity and review quality.
If you're reading this you probably know what REVPAR is for hotels but just in case, its a normalizing metric that is used by hotels for benchmarking and comparison that blends rate and occupancy because if you look at just one of the variables it doesn't tell the full story. REVPAR is one of the key metrics used during the acquisition decision process for hotels and similarly, HT Score is one of the key metrics used to determine which software a hotelier will select on HotelTechReport.
REVPAR example (ADR x Occupancy)
What is it? Blended metric to normalize and compare hotels using key variables that paint a 'fuller' and more accurate picture
What are the variables? Rate x occupancy
What does the blended metric help solve for? A hotel with a super high rate but low occupancy means the rate probably isn't the right rate. And a hotel with super high occupancy but with a really low rate means there's the opposite issue with pricing and the hotel might be giving away its rooms to cheap (or even at a loss).
HT Score example (Review quantity x Review quality)
What is it? Blended metric to normalize and compare vendor reputations using key variables that paint a 'fuller' and more accurate picture
What are the variables? Review quantity x review quality (average ratings)
What does the blended metric help solve for? If rankings were solely based on review quantity, then a product with a lot of bad reviews could be top rated. On the flip side if rankings were solely based on review quantity a product with one (or a few) cherry picked perfect reviews could easily boost to the top of the rankings. Both cases obviously bad and inaccurate.
What carries the most weight in the HT Score?
What carries the most weight in the HT Score?
Reviews are "the most important thing" on HotelTechReport
Reviews are absolutely critical to your success on HTR and are the primary success driver you can (and should) focus on. Reviews fuel your reputation and the HT Score...and the HT Score determines your rankings...and your rankings are what drive profile visibility, leads and sales enablement opportunities on HTR which catalyzes the HotelTechReport virtuous cycle where as your reputation improves from customer feedback, you generate more value from the platform over time.
But there are other quality signals...
The Hotel Tech Score scoring algorithm is predominantly based on customer ratings so these are by far the most important metric to focus on (quantity of reviews, average ratings and review recency) but it also factors in other quality signals including company resources, partner recommendations, integrations and more.
One of our core values is transparency and we will always be 100% open and transparent with how the HT Score is calculated. We also keep a detailed log of all changes and improvements so you understand the thought process for any changes (which usually arise from feedback from the community).
🚨 Please note that the primary driver of your HT Score is review quantity (specifically meeting the category minimum review threshold) and review quality (ie. average ratings). All other quality signals carry less weight and should only be focused after you have a strong foundation and reputation on HTR
How is the HT Score Calculated?
How is the HT Score Calculated?
Similar to Google and other ranking platforms, we do not disclose the core proprietary algorithm; however, we strive to be open and transparent about the mechanics, rationale and ranking factors that go into the HT Score and build them into the Reputation Report Card so that companies can easily understand how to improve their reputation. We also keep a detailed log of all changes and improvements so you understand the thought process for any changes (which usually arise from feedback from the community).
Basic Analysis: Your raw HT Score is calculated
Your raw HT Score is calculated based on the most important (and most heavily weighted) variable, user reviews
Variables include: 🤝 Profile trustworthiness, 👍 Average satisfaction ratings
In-Category Relative Analysis: The algorithm then compares and assesses relative ratings
The HT Score algorithm then assesses review quantity, recency, consistency and depth of each product relative to other products in the category.
Variables include:
Review volume (category threshold)
Review recency
Review depth
Customer centric processes (aka review consistency)
Share of Voice (aka client bias)
Bonus Quality Signals: Then it analyzes additional quality signals
Additional quality signals are then factored in to the scoring algorithm.
Variables include:
👏 Customer Advocates
🌏 Global Reach
🏨 Verified Case Studies
📞 Certified Customer Support
🤝 Partner Recommendations
🔌 Integrations
💼 Partner Ecosystem
👬 Company Resources
⏰ Company Staying Power
🔥 Trending Score
☑️ Profile Completeness
Category Curve Benchmarking: And finally scores are curved within the category
Scores are then normalized and curved at the category level where the product with the most points is curved to an HT Score of 100/100.
Remember, the Hotel Tech Score is a way to take all of the feedback and thousands of data points from users and boil it down into one simple number to help buyers be able to quickly skim the site, and more specifically a category, and find the best tech for their hotel based on customer reviews and quality signals like integrations, partner recommendations and company resources. After steps 1-3 are completed, the HT Score then looks for the product with the highest score and curves the rest of the products in the category based on the leading product with the leading product scoring 100/100 as the top choice in the category based on the HT Score variables and quality signals.
Have any questions or feedback?
We value feedback your feedback so don't be shy! If you have ideas for how you think we can improve the HT Score, please reach out via the on-site live chat.