TrustYou expands beyond hospitality, evaluates remote/hybrid work model
EVEN though the space of hotel reviews and sentiment analysis has been around for about 15 years – Circos Brand Karma was founded in 2006, TrustYou in 2008 and Revinate 2009, just to cite a few of the startups in this sector, it is still “completely undervalued”, said Benjamin Jost, CEO and co-founder of hotel reputation management software platform TrustYou.
“Quality as a hard data point is still underused and under appreciated by hoteliers,” he told WiT in an interview over Zoom from his office in Hamburg. “Look at how much focus there still is on price and revenue management, instead of quality measurements. There is a reason, it is harder to look at reputation management analytics and combine that with pricing analytics; hoteliers are used to looking at pure price metrics.”
Being an optimist however, he hopes that Covid and the desire by the industry to build back better with quality tourism will accelerate thinking of hoteliers to pursue business using quality data points rather than just on price.
“If you take a hotel that is charging $150 with a score of 9 versus a hotel charging $120 with a score of 7, the consumer will pick the 9. A few hoteliers understand this but the vast majority still does not.”
Jost had just returned from a management retreat where the company, which was acquired by Japan’s Recruit Holdings in 2017, spent a few days navel-gazing its future as well as the space it operates in.
There are two big priorities on its plate – how to reorganise its workplace and teams in a new world of remote work and to add non-hospitality, travel-related verticals such as tours and activities, attractions and restaurants onto its platform, which has evolved into a more proactive live chat product, covering pre-, during and post-customer stays.
On the workforce front, its team of 160 is widely distributed with offices in Madrid, Munich, San Diego, Singapore, Tokyo and Romania. It has an office in Munich which can take 100 staff but “now on a good day we have 10 people coming in”, said Jost. “Our challenge is how to keep the TrustYou culture intact with remote work and a hybrid model.”
While cutting back on office space may save some costs, Jost said, “It will in the end probably cost a lot more money if we want to do it right – because all those savings would go into organising team interaction meetings and events, getting all the teams together and flying everyone in.”
The new model throws up interesting challenges around attracting and retaining talent. “Those days of hiring an engineer in Romania for 50-60% less than in Germany or in Spain for 30% less are over. There is now a level playing field for talent in terms of pay grade and we can now hire anyone within Europe independent of location.
“Getting the pay scale right will be a challenge – we can no longer look at paying Romanian salaries or German salaries but rethink the grid of junior, medium, senior talent, and hire to fit into this grid.”
On the business side, Jost said it makes sense for TrustYou to add tours and activities, attractions and restaurants to its underlying tech and “focus on streamlining the pre-, during and post-journey”.
“We want to build a platform that everyone can use and is agnostic for every part of the travel journey for multiple types of businesses.”
While he estimates that Covid has cost it two years of time, it’s also caused an evolution of its product into more of a “live experience” (live surveys and live messaging) and that is a strength as travel in Europe returns.
“People are travelling and having the best summer of their lives in Europe. What we found when travel first returned, people had more questions than usual and it was more important for travellers to communicate with the hotels before arrival and during their stay, so our question was, how do we use tech to facilitate communication between hotel and traveller?
“We’ve always had the post-stay experience but we introduced the live experience and expanded it into a communications channel. Think of it as a WhatsApp group on steroids; hoteliers can immediately respond to guests right away.
“The worldwide adoption of QR codes has also made this easier to implement. They are popping up everywhere and the days of the hotel phone are gone, there will be a QR code standing by for you to scan.”
What this means, said Jost, is that “the world of reviews which was used more for longterm strategic decisions has evolved into an operational matrix as well. Someone can say, I need two towels in my room, and the hotel can operationalise it, so operations software and live chat can sit together in one tech stack.”
TrustYou has, of course, not been spared by the pandemic. On course for a huge year in 2020, with big plans for expansion, it went into survival mode for most of the year. “No one knew what was coming and we put a brake on everything. How much money will we lose? How much money do we have in the bank?”
Thankfully, he said, its subscription model turned out to be a savior. “When you have an annual recurring business, it can be a disadvantage some years but it saved us. We lost some business but not that much.”
So this year has been one of “regrouping, replanning, reorganising” to prepare for 2022. TrustYou is no stranger to pivots. It started out with ambitions to be a consumer meta-search for hospitality but just couldn’t find the traction or compete with the likes of Kayak and Trivago.
“That’s when we thought, maybe we can use the data we had collected to create dashboards for hoteliers and monetise it. It was a side business which became our core business,” said Jost.
Since its acquisition by Recruit, Jost said it’s been left alone to operate pretty independently. “They support us in funding and advice.”
He remains a big believer in travel. “This is a dip. If you zoom out and look at it, it’s a two-year blip. I am bullish in general about travel and hospitality. And I am bullish about players like us who specialise in travel.”
• Featured image credit: Fullerton Hotel, Singapore
