20 Oct 2016

TrustYou ramps up its guest feedback integration globally

TrustYou has unveiled a fresh way for hotels to connect with its guest feedback platform via the hotel technology systems they already use.

More than 20 partners worldwide, such as Accor’s Fastbooking, Cloudbeds, and eRevMax, have begun to sync with the company’s TrustYou Connect solution.

Here’s the backstory: Most hotels use at least one tech tool to manage their property, and many use several, including property management systems (PMSs), channel managers, internet booking engines (IBEs), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, or revenue management systems (RMS).

Each of these systems typically have guest profile data. Up until now, there’s been some friction in syncing that data from the hotels via these tools with TrustYou’s guest reviews platform. Connection required an ad hoc, high-touch process.

So TrustYou has come up with an easier way to let tech tools, like PMSs, to have the ability to give their hotel clients basic access to TrustYou’s platform.

Hotels can, for free, sign in to their participating PMS or other system as usual and see TrustYou’s survey tool for post-stay feedback data. The hotel doesn’t have to add any “plumbing” or have a separate TrustYou sign-on.

TrustYou can push the survey data collected from guests into the hotels CRM or other tool. So, the hotel’s guest card with profile data that hoteliers are already familiar with can be enriched with details such as the guest’s preferences and past experience at the property.

It’s not an original idea, per se. Most hotel tech tools, like PMSs and IBEs, already offer hotels basic guest surveys.

But that survey is typically “hidden in the dark Web.” The data is disconnected from the hotel’s marketing and other purposes. TrustYou’s solution differs in enabling the data to be mixed in.

TrustYou chief executive Benjamin Jost tells Tnooz that early adoption rates have been promising among the partners who are the torchbearers of this integration this year.

One client is the aforementioned Fastbooking, a French-based digital services provider. Jost thinks it’s possible that nearly all of the thousands hotels it serves will sign up for TrustYou’s service within the next six months, based on current adoption rates.

Here, the details about how the splintered feedback and hotel profile data gets unified:

TrustYou is accessing the APIs from hotel tech solutions like PMSs, which send a unique ID number for the guest (which is tied to the guest’s basic profile data) and the hotel’s unique ID number.

TrustYou uses the info to solicit and collect feedback from the guest via a survey.

Then the hotel tech platform can choose to call on its API to receive back the survey data matched with the relevant ID numbers. Its up to the hotel tech provider in how it displays and visualizes the information for the hotel, such as in a hotel guest card.

Over time, TrustYou aims to reach hundreds of thousands of hotels through this ecosystem. It expects to make money by offering upgrades to its other feedback solutions, such as its new chat-based messaging service for talking with guests while on site that it added via its Checkmate acquisition earlier this year.