The TrustScore Brings Transparency to Hotels, Consumers & Travel Agents Alike

At TrustYou we’ve built our business as hospitality-facing solution for online reputation management. We are well known in the hospitality industry, but if you aren’t in the business, we would bet that you had not heard of us. Until now.

This week our TrustScore went public (No, we are not being traded on the market). We did, however, add a search feature to our homepage that allows you to find your hotel’s score and post it directly on your website - all for free. This also means that anyone (yes, friendly hotel competition, consumers and travel agents) can search for your hotel’s TrustScore (ranking based on 1 to 100).

So what is this “TrustScore” we are talking about? Think of it as the Klout Score for hotels. The TrustScore is based on a compilation reviews and sentiments across all review sites, blogs and social media comments out there (think TripAdvisor, Expedia, Google+, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of niche sites where guests can leave comments). We monitor over 200 sites in 23 languages, so the score truly is a global picture of what is being said about the hotel. Instead of having to search hundreds of sites to understand what is really being said, we boil it down into one easy-to-read score.

We think it’s a game changer. Why? Let’s take a look:

Hotels that rock – Hotels with the highest TrustScores will want to wear them as a badge of honor. If you could tattoo the words excellent on your forehead, you would, right (in a figurative way, of course)? Hotels with “excellent” TrustScores will promote them, and rightfully so! To help facilitate this, we give free embed codes to hotels that wish to display their score. That’s right, free marketing on your own website. Consumers who see this will be encouraged to book right on your website (hellooo, conversion rates!).

Hotels missing the mark – Hotels that fall below “excellent” or “good” to “okay” or “poor” will probably wish the TrustScore would go away. Back to the tattooing of your forehead analogy, you wouldn’t want to put “I’m just okay” across your brow. Smart hotels will see this as an opportunity; they will use the feedback that is bringing down the TrustScore constructively to make improvements. Is the elevator chronically out of order? Are there housekeeping issues? What weighs down the ranking is what will ultimately bring them up once fixed. Consumers who see an “okay” or lesser ranking will not be encouraged to book. A drop in bookings will encourage quicker resolutions.

Stepping it up – When your report card, so to speak, is in plain view for all to see it pushes you to excellence. The best comparison would be when New York City restaurants were required to post letter grades in the window of the establishment - where they can easily be seen by people passing by - that correspond to the scores received from sanitary inspections (A, B, C, etc.). If one of your favorite restaurants all of a sudden had a “C” in the window, it quickly dropped from your top list. The end result of this transparency was a better experience for diners. The same, we hope, will hold true for hotel guests.

We’re in this for hoteliers; we want to provide the best and most efficient way for them to monitor the hundreds of review sites and comments out there on the social web. In doing this, our core values have been transparency and authenticity. We see the TrustScore as a win-win for both hoteliers and consumers. As they say, the truth shall set you free. What do you think?