TrustYou – Twitter Synopsis: Uses semantic technology to analyze/aggregate reviews across dozens of travel sites & social communities for hotel reputation management
PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit New Company Runner-up
Just the Facts:
Company Name: TrustYou
Website: www.trustyou.com
Location: Munich, Germany
Judging Category: New Company
Business Segment: Semantic Review Aggregation
Product Name: TrustYou Analytics & Semantics
Demonstrated by: Benjamin Jost, Co-Founder & Managing Director
Company Description (from website)
Trustyou.com is a search engine for reviews on the internet. Millions of people on hundreds of websites publish their criticism, both positive and negative, for hotels they have stayed at. In making a booking decision, it is virtually impossible for a single person to find and read all relevant reviews found in the Internet. It was our vision to make all information on a hotel available in a matter of seconds and presorted according to personal relevance. With that aim in mind, we created TrustYou.com, which browses through more than 10 million reviews on over 200.000 hotels. Using TrustYou.com you can filter those hotels that belong to categories relevant to you (e.g. near beach, lavish breakfast, child friendly) and find the best price for a specific hotel in only a few seconds. This saves you a lot of time and guarantees a safe booking decision.
Synopsis:
Challenge Solved:
Vast amounts of unstructured guest comments and reviews across a wide number of sites and social platforms.
Point of Differentiation:
TrustYou provides a social semantic search platform that supports three fundamental functions –
- Search – Finding relevant information – search
- Structure – How to organize information
- Analytics – Interpret the information
TrustYou currently supports seven languages.
Key Innovation:
Combining single input box for search with user generated review content processed through a semantic search engine
Assessment
Overall Impression
TrustYou declares if Content is King, Context is Queen. In essence, TrustYou applies semantic keyword analysis to interpret reviews and categorizes the content of the reviews. It provides a summary of the highlights and lowlights of hotels for prospective guest without the guests needing to drill through pages of reviews.
In many ways, TrustYou is trying to accomplish a similar task as Uptake.com and its recent RealTravel.com acquisition – to provide an improved hotel search experience by providing improved context.
However, the more interesting aspect is the dashboard and analytics enabling hotels to monitor their guests’ social sentiment and to take action based on the reviews.
Technological Innovation:
Hybrid semantic infrastructure platform that provides consumer search interface, applies structure to unstructured data and provides supplier sentiment analytics.
Business Model Sustainability:
TrustYou has already done the heavy lifting by tackling the 10 million reviews on 200,000 hotels. Additionally, deploying in seven languages is another important foundation for future growth. With this work done, adding clients will leverage the existing platform and allow the semantic search engine platform to benefit from further refinement as additional clients are added.
Marketplace Impact:
With multi-language support and European market leadership, TrustYou is well positioned to grow in the hotel industry which is highly fragmented and difficult for competitors to penetrate – particularly with a multi-lingual product.
TrustYou currently has 1,000+ clients and is the market leader in Europe when it comes to hotel reputation management.
The main challenge facing TrustYou is the large number of social reputation management tools, however, with its specialization in travel and its focus on optimizing its hotel oriented semantic search platform, TrustYou has the potential of carving out a significant niche for supporting the B2B management hotel property and brand reviews.
Official Result: PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit New Company Runner-up
Community Comments: TrustYou What The Hashtag Twitter Archive
The 2010 Travel Innovation Summit is part of the PhoCusWright Conference – Held November 16-18, 2010 at the Westin Kierland Resort & Spa, Scottsdale, Arizona USA