Company Name: TrustYou
Official Website: https://www.trustyou.com/
What do they do? Search tool designed to sift through “10 million reviews on over 200,000 hotels” to deliver results on hotels that are most relevant to your search criteria, based on other customer reviews
Are they a business-to-business (B2B) company, or business-to-consumer (B2C)? B2C
Founder(s): Founded by Prof. Dr. Franz Guenthner in cooperation with the Center for Information and Language Processing of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, of which he is the head
Date Founded: March 2008
Presentation Notes: TrustYou believes the current landscape of user-generated content (especially, in this case, user-generated reviews) is “information chaos” and that their software is how this content will be filtered in the future. The three questions related to user-generated reviews that the software answers are: what reviews and information are relevant to me? what’s the best way to guide users to the information best suited to them? how can you as a provider know what people have written about you in reviews? TrustYou’s so-called “magic box” pulls content from user-generated reviews and filters blocks of text based on keywords and their “evaluative process” to create categorized information. It can even tag comments as either positive, negative, or neutral. This allows users to search the reviews for relevant information, and find specific feedback within reviews quickly. TrustYou is available in several languages, and can translate into your language – so if you see hotel reviews that are only written in German, you’ll still know roughly what they say. From the hotelier’s perspective, it’s easier to see what people are writing about you in a structured way. The software sends alerts when there’s new feedback written, allows hotel’s to compare themselves to the competition, and then use the information for marketing purposes – not to mention making changes to things that generate negative feedback. TrustYou “wants to be the Intel Inside” for the hotel industry.
Why should/shouldn’t travelers care? Travelers who do try to research user-generated reviews for hotels (among other things) before they book often get overwhelmed by the information, so it’s easy to see why this could be a useful tool. If the existing reviews could be codified (which then makes them more searchable) that not only saves the traveler time, but also saves them from potential frustration. It’s not immediately clear to me if the software also makes it easier to weed out questionable reviews (like the ones that appear to be written by a hotel), but that would be another helpful aspect of the software.
Author: Sean Keener