Ben Jost

Market leadership is defined by “how many users are using our data”, said co-founder and CEO, Ben Jost.

Jost, who was recently in Singapore, is currently on the lookout for a chief executive in Asia and is looking for sales personnel in China and Japan. It already has a sales presence in Singapore and India.

He said the timing was right for the company to venture deeper into Asia. “There’s been a lot of education of the market, thanks to Brand Karmaand others, on how important reviews and reputation management are to hospitality and we have enough critical mass of customers to expand.”

Globally, TrustYou claims to have 12,000 hotels as customers through contracts with major brands such as Accor, Starwood and Fairmont. Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, is also a customer, as is Solare Hotels in Japan. Its tool is available in several languages including Chinese and Japanese.

Jost said TrustYou’s approach to the business was from a data and technology perspective. “At heart we are a data and technology company. We want to spread our data and technology as widely as possible and our core focus is monitoring data to help hoteliers make smart decisions.”

He sees social media as individual data silos (Facebook, Twitter, OTAs, own hotel websites) to be mined. “These data silos influence decisions of end users – 80% and more of customers are influenced by such data and it hits the topline revenue of every hotel and e-commerce site. We want to be part of the circle of trust where it happens.

“That includes posting – infrastructure for hotels to capture the posts themselves – and integrating that into the monitoring part and helping the brands.com market their reputation themselves.”

This is done through a TrustYou score. The company claims that “on average, room prices go up $12 for every 1% increase in a hotel’s TrustScore”.

Asked if he intended to build the TrustScore as a consumer-facing brand – the way TripAdvisor does with its awards and rankings – Jost said, “We don’t want to build the brand that way. We want to use the Intel insight strategy – we build the chip but the end user doesn’t have to be aware of what’s running in their computer. We want to help hotels analyse the data and show that to the end user in a way they understand.”

TrustYou’s target is bigger hotels and groups. The market is not that developed in the smaller, independent, boutique sector but Jost said he’s seeing a shift in Europe where the TrustScore has become part of the star rating process in 11 countries on the continent.

He said there was a trend towards localization of reviews and TrustYou tended to go into markets with lots of data.

TrustYou actually started life in 2008 as a B2C model – it wanted to be the search of travel reviews. “The initial idea was borne out of the idea to create one solution to search reviews and give it an overall score and make it searchable. We started with 400,000 hotels on our database,” said Jost.

“When we launched our alpha version, we got a lot of press but we couldn’t compete with TripAdvisor and the OTAs in terms of marketing. Then hoteliers approached us and said it was great to see an online reputation service.

“That’s when it struck us that there was a market need and hoteliers said if you give us the tool, we would pay for it.”

Its aim is to pick industries with widespread data silos where monitoring and aggregating services are needed. As such, it is expanding into restaurants, attractions and destinations. “The collection of big data in hospitality has been solved. What attraction to go to is still not solved – that’s hard and very fragmented.”

The biggest threat to the industry, he said, is if “the whole review world would be destroyed in terms of trust through fake reviews, for instance”.

Reviews were also moving from “wisdom of the crowd” to “friends of friends”.

“The other danger is if data silos disappeared and there was only one left – like Facebook. We like an open world,” said Jost.

More people too were posting reviews from their mobile devices – go somewhere, scan something, review something. “Companies like foursquare are moving into the Yelp concept with location-based reviews. We help hotels in terms of instant posting – the whole QR code is spreading.”

The challenge for hotels is “how to get all that data back into their systems so that the next time Mr Smith checks in, we know more about him – like a Klout score – and we already have his profile. How to integrate all that data from the social web is the challenge – it’s not about more and more data points, it’s how to make sense of all the millions of data points.”