TrustYou’s acquisition of real-time messaging specialist Checkmate last week fills the missing piece of the data puzzle that it is building in a bid to be the “company that knows everything about every guest when it comes to feedback” and, in turn, “the data platform that powers the booking process”.
Jost: “We want to be wherever guest feedback happens.”
CEO and co-founder Benjamin Jost said with guests using more messaging to communicate pre-stay and on-site with hotels, Checkmate’s on-site review platform allowing hotel guests to communicate on messaging apps was the “blank spot” which has now been filled.
“We want to be wherever guest feedback happens.”
He explained, “If you look at the traveller journey, a customer searches and books a hotel online, then he goes to the hotel, stays and leaves. He uses guest feedback when he books – reviews, scores and rankings – and he books based on feedback, price and location.
“Then pre-stay and on-site, he communicates with a messaging product – that’s what Checkmate did, be it Whatsapp, Messenger or WeChat. Guests are now messaging more than emailing at this stage.”
With that on-site piece incorporated into the data that TrustYou is collecting, Jost, who said “we have more eyeballs on our data than TripAdvisor these days”, added the company is now able to scale meta-reviews and influence the booking process with pre-stay, on-site and post-stay data.
Asked why it didn’t then move into the instant or assisted booking piece which other meta sites are doing, Jost said, “It’s a very different play. We started in 2008 as a meta-search site and people could book with TrustYou but we realised that even with a compelling product, we couldn’t compete in marketing, so instead of competing with everyone, we thought, why not build a data platform that everyone can build on.
“Google or KAYAK have much more scale than we could ever have. So we decided to focus on the big data play in guest feedback. We now offer pure B2B software as a service to power the booking.”
Having done the first pivot from B2C meta-search site to B2B data and software services provider, it made a second pivot when it decided to cast the data net wider to cover not only its hotel customers but the entire travel market. “We felt there would be a need for hotels to know everything about the market and for intermediaries to know everything about every player.”
Its acquisition of Checkmate, for an undisclosed sum, follows its purchase of Brand Karma’s reputation management tool last year and Review Analyst in 2011.
While Checkmate is not yet available in Asia, Jost said “we didn’t buy it for the customers, we had common customers, we bought it for the team and aligned vision, and product. It’s a good acquisition.”
He said the Brand Karma acquisition had also gone well. “We didn’t lose any customer – there was the high risk – and customers are happy with the new platform that they have.”
Jost said, “We feel guest feedback is the most under-rated data point in the industry – everyone talks about price – but no one says what if I can get my score from 3.9 to 4.2, and what can I do to get there. This is the best loyalty programme there is – when you master the guest experience based on quality data and the customer keeps combing back.”
For Jost, the next big thing in guest feedback goes beyond different delivery mediums but “understanding the full cycle of guest feedback and using that to influence human behaviour in operations”.
“On the booking side, we have not really mastered the best search experience, for example, the best romantic hotel and what couples say about it, or the best sushi on a rooftop bar. We’re just at the beginning of that and we will move from full text reviews to summaries, getting just the juicy details.
“When I look at the summaries we now have, I feel we are only 20% of where we need to be. There’s a lot of data analytics and machine learning to be done to eke out the unique details.”
