Travel agents seeking insights into potential properties for customers are often left to search the Internet far and wide to glean perspective on a particular property, a challenge which has been directly addressed by reputation managers TrustYou with their newest product.
The product is an integration of TrustYou's core services into the Sabre GDS workflow as a Sabre Red App, and it will allow agents to view hotels' overall ranking across all guest-review platforms.
This comprehensive look will include TrustYou's proprietary TrustScore, which takes a property's overall landscape into account via profiles across networks such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. The TrustScore considers over 250 sites.
The app, available via the Sabre Red App Centre, will provide a quick-and-easy overview of guest sentiment, ideally informing travel agents' choices as they make recommendations to individual clients.
The ratings can be broken down into a number of categories including location, staff, service, food, Internet. It also recommends the type of hotel, such as family friendly, good for a business stay or romantic getaway. All of this information is captured from sentiment and opinions from millions of online chatter about 400,000 hotels.
Sabre claims that they are the "first GDS to incorporate a global review rating index for agents to make better informed booking decisions." Indeed, other indexes such as ReviewPro's Global Review Index offer global property perspectives, with integrations such as LeisueLink and TripAdvisor, but do not currently integrate directly into a GDS workflow.
Travelport's Rooms and More has offered access since launch to TripAdvisor, AOL Travel and other sources of reviews and property information. Travelport also tells Tnooz that they are "working on the integration of a well-recognized rating review site into the GDS desktop flow. "
Chris Kroeger, the SVP for Sabre Travel Network, sees their product as a critical utility for agents:
To be part of our Sabre Red App Centre you must deliver creativity and innovation that will deliver real value to Sabre-connected travel agents.
The TrustYou Sabre Red App provides incredible time saving for agents while giving them a global, comprehensive look at what travelers have said with one simple click. This allows agents to dramatically reduce research time on a hotel’s reputation and invest more time on other important client needs.
Transparency is also a value-add being touted by the TrustYou team. Co-founder Ben Jost:
Instead of looking at a site or two to get an idea of what other travelers have said this app allows agents to get an extremely detailed look at what thousands of people have said across hundreds of review sites. By having guest feedback at their disposal, the travel agent can make faster, more reliable booking decisions for their guests.
ReviewPro, for their part, are actively looking into further opportunities in the partnerships area.
CEO RJ Friedlander said in an email to Tnooz:
We are in talks with a number of companies in the distribution space that are interested in tapping into our unparalleled data coverage and data quality and that are interested in leveraging our Global Review Index, the industry standard general on-line reputation benchmark. We have already won a number of key partnership agreements with companies that data quality and accuracy are of paramount importance
Sabre's Red App Centre now features over 100 apps from 80 certified Red App providers. Agents in 70 countries have generated over 30,000 app downloads.