IMGuest, a social network for business travelers focused on their hotels stays, introduced a premium service for hotels.
The Israel-based start-up, featured in a TLabs Showcase here, enables business travelers to check into hotels using the service for free and to search for new business contacts for networking purposes in the hotel or at nearby properties.
The new premium service, offered for $50 per hotel monthly, enables hotel management to better engage with IMGuest-connected guests.
For example, with the premium service, hotel staff can invite guests in real-time to the hotel bar or restaurant; send guests an interactive message about freebies or benefits for conferences, the hotel spa or entertainment; and gather anonymous feedback from guests about the property.
The anonymous feedback from guests, which hopefully would be used to improve services at the hotel, is received privately and not through a public guest review posting as is done on sites such as TripAdvisor, says Yossy Mendelovich, an IMGuest co-founder.
And, another feature of the fee-based service is that hoteliers can recieve social reports about their guests, Mendelovich adds.
The reports, which can be segmented by hotel location, profiles the guests according to the purpose of their stays, gender, age, number of guests in the room, profession (taken from information on other social networks), education, country and social effect (calculated by number of checkins times the number of friends from other social networks).
About eight hotels are currently participating in a trial of the premium service, although it was launched several days ago.
IMGuest says its free service is available for more than 140,000 hotels worldwide.