Planning and booking a trip is a serious time investment; it’s practically like adopting a new hobby for a couple months. Guess what? The hours spent researching everything can be cut down, so that you actually can adopt that new hobby. Enter TrustYou, a website that does exactly that, specifically with regard to hotel research. Created in 2008 by Benjamin Jost and Jakob Riegger, this search tool has recently been relaunched and gives users a straightforward review of a hotel in one single click. TrustYou monitors over 200 review sites in 23 languages, so you get a global picture of a property and an updated “411” on what’s being said about it. It’s a clout score for hotels if you will and there are scores for 200,000 of them with 400,000 reviewed, making the database accumulative.
For the first time, prospective guests can get a hotel’s “TrustScore” which is a grade out of 100, based on a compilation of all review sites and social media comments out there. When they go to www.trustyou.com, they simply enter the name of the hotel and the TrustScore will be displayed with a list of comments used to formulate it. Travelers can search all of the hotels they are considering in a destination in a matter of minutes.
How does it work? By using ‘reputation surveys’, past guests evaluate hotels they’ve stayed at and give their opinion on the quality, service, comfort factor of the bed, amenities etc. The score will change depending on how the hotel responds to the evaluation and whether it improves in a given area. About 83% of online customers will be taking the trust score and analysis into account, so smart hotels can use this information to their advantage through ‘reputation marketing’ if they maintain a good score. It’s an easy way for hotel reviews and overall online reputation to be viewed in a “grade.” For example, a hotel might do horribly on Expedia but have great TripAdvisor reviews. TrustYou.com takes all online content into consideration. Hotels that do well will wear it as a badge of honor.
So enter the hotels you’re interested in and in the time you’ve saved looking them all up, you’ll have perfected your purl stitch or enrolled in a fantasy football league.