Press

TrustYou is confirmed as the most innovative travel company by a jury of “leaders of the travel industry, people that have invested and made millions from the creation of great travel companies.” At the center of TrustYou’s presentation was the Circle of Trust, a new vision of TrustYou’s products that enable the flow of information and feedback between hotels, guests and travel companies.

As the only non-American company, TrustYou advances to the finals of the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit 2010, surpassing its 32 competitors, the most innovative travel companies of the year.

TrustYou was voted the most innovative Internet travel startup of 2008 by the Verband Internet Reisevertrieb, an association of German online travel portals. In the so-called “Launch Pad” competition, TrustYou was able to beat numerous other companies.

Is it time to disrupt the hospitality survey services industry? TrustYou thinks so. Today it’s launching its ReviewAnalyst Survey, a free guest satisfaction tool that hotels and hotel chains can use to integrate information from visitor surveys with information in social media reviews, and potentially bolster their reputation among consumers as a result.

TrustYou, the market leader in social media monitoring and semantic technologies for the online reviews and social commerce space, announced today that Solare Hotels & Resorts Co. Ltd. is using TrustYou ReviewAnalyst to capture and analyze guest comments and recommendations across the Internet.

TrustYou analyzes the thousands of hotel and restaurant reviews made available through sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp. The company focuses on sentiment analysis, or understanding whether a word means something negative or positive. For example, someone saying the hotel food made them “sick,” is negative, where a “sick” king sized bed is positive.

Munich-based TrustYou’s more than 3,000 hotel customers had been concentrated in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and Japan, and with the acquisition of Dallas-headquartered ReviewAnalyst, TrustYou enters the U.S. market for the first time.

TrustYou, a social media monitoring and semantic technologies startup, has raised a $5 million Series A round. It’s also acquiring Dallas-based competitor ReviewAnalyst. The round was led by Credit Agricole Private Equity and will be used to expand worldwide operations out of its base in Munich Germany. Its “sentiment search platform” is aimed at the hotel, restaurant and travel industries in the United States and Europe.

TrustYou, a Munich-based startup that makes semantic search technology for categorizing online reviews, has taken on $5 million in Series A funding to fuel its growth in the United States.

“Since June 2011, Quality Reservations GmbH has been working together with the Munich social media analytics firm TrustYou. Quality Reservations is now able to systematically search through and evalute more than 220 million online reviews with TrustYou’s product.”

We’ve got our first press coverage in the Spanish tech press! Check it out at the link above, at the publication Hosteltur. (original spanish title: “La Asociación Hotelera Alemana incluye los reviews en su sistema de clasificación”)

“Bookassist has partnered with TrustYou (www.trustyou.com), the innovative semantic search and social media management specialists for the provision of automatic online reviews monitoring that forms the core of the Reputation Alert service.”

“Simply put, Munich’s hotels are rated the best.” state the results of a recent investigation by TrustYou, the semantic meta-search engine for reviews on the Internet. According to the recent study, the hotels in the Bavarian capital city have the highest overall customer satisfaction of the three contenders for the Olympic Winter Games in 2018.”

“The Organisation of German Hotels and Restaurants (DOHEGA) will combine TrustYou’s data with existing professional reviews from writers and hotel pundits to establish a new star rating for each of the accommodation and eating venues included in its database, currently around 240,000.”

“TrustYou – Social semantic search. These guys can take a free-text hotel review (i.e. one written long hand by a consumer) and pick out the key aspects. You can play with their ‘magic box’ on their website.”

“Benjamin Jost, CEO and co-founder of TrustYou, convinced the high-profile jury in his presentation and won against twelve competitors. Central concept of the presentation was the ‘Circle of Trust’, with which TrustYou supports the entire tourism industry: From the generation and collection of reviews to the detailed semantic analysis and active marketing through widgets.”

“Social and semantic search engine TrustYou has launched a feature that allows hoteliers to see and interact with Twitter users looking for hotels in the area.”

“Other than classical review portals such as TripAdvisor and HolidayCheck, TrustYou now also incorporates content from the world’s largest search engine. Customers of the social media monitoring tool TrustYou Analytics can now see how their hotel is rated on Google Places.”

“Another new feature is the monitoring of Twitter, Facebook and Google Blogs, and a new tool which allows formulating tweets and status updates directly from TrustYou Analytics.”

“Benjamin Jost of TrustYou presented his company’s tool in his presentation, which allows ordering hotel reviews to be sorted by categories to improve usability and conversion rates. Very interesting concept.”

“TrustYou now has sales offices with lokale customer support in Beijing, Dubai, Amsterdam, London, Warsaw, Rome, Barcelona, Mexico City, Winnipeg and Los Angeles.”

“The search engine for hotel reviews expands its sales team in order to market their monitoring tool TrustYou Analytics globally.”

“Together with independent semantic search specialist TrustYou, we now present hotel reviews from various sources on our own website. Reviews from different sources are collected, summarized and compared for our users.”

“Hotelleriesuisse initiates a partnership with review portal TrustYou.com to incorporate guest reviews on its websites.”

“TrustYou offers content via its Widget API to destinations that have not collected their own reviews.”

“TrustYou: Behind the portal is a meta search engine. […] Reviews that are deemed untrustworthy are filtered out.”

“In the future it will not only be important how much content one has. It is crucial that the user find well what he is looking for.”

„«If the hotelier knows his house’s strengths and weaknesses, then he must react», says Benjamin Jost, CEO of TrustYou. That is why TrustYou Analytics also offers best practice tips on the handling of customer feedback, and instructions on how to use the feedback functionalities of different portals.“

“By now, hotel managers take reviews seriously. But they lacked a way of getting an overview of all review portals. This sparked the idea for a tool that finds and analyzes millions of reviews – also on social media sites like Facebook.”

“www.trustyou.com, a kind of Google for guest reviews. The website simply asks you to type in city and hotel type, and displays relevant hotels with photos.”

“TrustYou has become an established semantic search engine in record time. Now it’s time for the next step in its evolution.”

“TrustYou has filtered the world’s 10 best hotels from over 300,000 reviewed hotels in 181 countries.”

“TrustYou has taken a look at the 40 most important review portals and analyzed their features for hoteliers.”

The German TV show “SAT.1-Magazin” checks out Bavaria’s worst reviewed hotels – and TrustYou cofounder Benjamin Jost explains why hotel star ratings do not guarantee a pleasant vacation, and how you can improve your odds much more easily with a quick and targeted Internet search.

“The revolution can no longer be stopped. Modern hospitality quality management ‘builds on the opinions of guests’, according to TrustYou CEO Benjamin Jost.”

“‘Reviews are becoming more and more relevant for guests, and therefore hoteliers have started to adapt’, says Benjamin Jost.”

“Expedia cornered the market in online travel with TripAdvisor’s user generated ratings system. But at least one search engine now attempts to refine this market influencer and take it one step farther – meta ratings travel search company TrustYou.”

“All properties are represented with TrustYou reviews. ‘Any interested visitor can instantly judge the reputation of a hotel. The reviews written on www.oberstaufen.de are considered in the ratings as well.’”

“ … external specialists such as TrustYou offer high-quality digital brand and reputation analyses.”

“hotelleriesuisse, the association of Swiss hoteliers, cooperates with TrustYou. Online guest reviews are to be included in the daily work of its members.”

“Micros Fidelio becomes strategic partner of TrustYou.com. Effective immediately, the leading PMS provider offers its clients around the world the social media monitoring tool at a discount rate.”

“Micros Fidelio, booking engine for hotels and restaurants, cooperates with TrustYou and offers its users the possibility to see others’ online reviews directly.”

“TrustYou. Look out, Trip Advisor: This site not only pulls in user reviews from across the Web, but also analyzes them using semantic technology and pushes the qualities most important to you to the top of the results.”

“TrustYou could convince the audience consisting of CEO’s and presidents of leading online travel companies with its semantic search technology.”

“With multi-language support and European market leadership, TrustYou is well positioned to grow in the hotel industry. TrustYou currently has 1,000+ clients and is the market leader in Europe when it comes to hotel reputation management.”

“I like the platform a lot. The ability for hotels to track and report on sentiment and not just star ratings is an important aspect of customer service and guest management. The combination of front-end user tools and back office reporting make the offering quite compelling.”

“TrustYou v Revinate – aiming to cut through Too Much Information for hoteliers. Revinate’s presentation lacked the crisp clarity of the TrustYou and it was harder in the Revinate presentation to see how powerful the tech was in the background. That said, in focusing their pitch on the end tool for hoteliers Revinate provided a stronger business platform and model than TrustYou.”

“TrustYou, the first search engine for user reviews, has conducted a study comparing the functionality for management responses of the 40 most important portals.”

“Websites such as TrustYou Analytics provide a quick overview of all reviews on one’s own hotel.”

“The cooperation, which will last at least three years, is aiming to integrate guest reviews into the daily work of the association and its members.”

“Review search engine TrustYou cooperates with the American social media marketing agency Travelscream and now offers its services in the USA.”

“TrustYou brings its semantic search technology for the analysis and summary of Internet reviews to the USA.”

“TrustYou, an independent quality search engine, allows hotel chains and single hotels to get a complete overview of their online reputation and actively manage social media and guest reviews”

“Not only does TrustYou provide innovative technology for an attractive price, but they also provide guidelines for questions and problems with social media.”

“It’s becoming increasingly important for hoteliers not only to keep an eye on their online reputation, but also to managely it correctly. In other words: To react to negative reviews and rectify false claims.”

“‘Consumers should be careful’, explains Benjamin Jost, CEO of Trustyou. ‘With less than 70 points on the TrustYou Seal, a hotel has really been reviewed very negatively in comparison with others.’”

“TrustYou (search engine for Internet reviews) has taken a closer look a the 40 most important review portals and checked their features relevant for hoteliers.”

“Only 14 of the analyzed portals allow public management responses on guest reviews. TrustYou deems this feature the most important ‘tool’ of a hotelier to react to criticism and interact with guests.”

“Why is it so important for hoteliers to know what is being said about them on the Internet?”

“It’s interesting to see that very diverse opinions on a hotel can still result in a good overall score.”

“The German travel industry promotes its best: Jakob Riegger one of the best Online Managers 2010.”

“The online software summarizes opinions from hundreds of sources to a single review – the TrustYou Seal.”

“The sponsorship program is targeted at highly innovative companies that will strengthen Germany as a tech location. TrustYou was judged to have the potential to be competitive on the international Internet search market.”

“Berchtesgadener Land Tourismus has taken a pioneer role in the handling of Social Media and Web 2.0 in the marketing of touristic destinations – surely an example for other regions.”

“At the press of a button, the online guest feedback is summarized in such a way that it can be used for quality assurance of individual hotels at any time.”

“Analyses of guest reviews by Munich-based Internet platform TrustYou show that Austrian hotels beat their German neighbors in all categories.”

“For a hotelier, TrustYou is a MUST HAVE for online reputation management.”

“The first search engine for Internet reviews is convincing the international hotel business.”

“Thusly the user gets a trustworthy picture of the hotel’s reputation, more so than if looking at a single community. And on top, he might save a few hours on the preparation of his trip.”

“TrustYou to Showcase How Semantic Technology Can Analyze and Organize More Than 30 Million Hotel Reviews.”

“Its “Buzz” section allows hotels to respond to posts on all of the major social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr — from the TrustYou interface. The site features a best practices section in which it offers tips on how to interact with guests online, how to respond to reviews and how to contact various review sites.”

The Hotel Maritim “Schnitterhof” discusses its use of TrustYou to track the success of a renovation made due to negative reviews.

“TrustYou uses a proprietary search engine that enables users to find reviews by preferences, such as “family-friendly hotels in Seattle” or “New York, dogs.” Sort your results by score (based on how positive or negative the reviews were overall), price or star rating, or view them on a map.”

“The cooperation with TrustYou means that our visitors can receive current information by other travellers, effortlessly and well-structured. A huge time-saver, because there are millions of reviews on the Internet.”

“Bella Italia stays the most popular travel destination. According to statistics by travel search engine TrustYou, travellers are most satisfied with Italian hotels.”

“Since recently, TrustYou offers direct access to its technology to other businesses. This enables them to semantically structure the content on their website.”

“Why not just use Google, Bing, or Yahoo instead? TrustYou uses semantic search technologies, scanning for keywords and phrases and analyzing the patterns in which they appear. That makes it more sophisticated and accurate than using, say, Google.”

“With TrustYou we have chosen a partner which disposes of thirty man-years of experience in the development of semantic technology. The opportunities for optimization of portals for mobile terminals are unique.”

“Tracking down where people are talking about your company or product is important, noted Jakob Riegger, managing director of TrustYou GmbH. With the expansion of social media, there are quite a few channels that need to be monitored.”

“TrustYou has harnessed the power of semantic search to analyze and categorize millions of reviews. This technology is applied to a consumer website (trustyou.com) and to two business products that help hoteliers and travel sites manage conversations in social media and provide statistical analysis to improve the content on their own websites.”

“A new guide leads through the flood of reviews on the Internet – and compares prices on top of that.”

InterContinental Hotels integrates the TrustYou Seal on its web site: InterContinental Berchtesgaden Resort

“It is not always easy to get an overview of all review portals. But now there exists a meta search engine for this purpose: TrustYou.”

“The portal compares room rates of over 20 vendors for the specified travel dates – and leads you directly to the cheapest.”

“TrustYou has developed the first semantic search engine for hotel reviews. For guests, the TrustYou score is a quick summary and overview of reviews from many different sources.”

“Also, hoteliers and travel providers check review portals regularly. Because ‘good grades can increase bookings for a hotel, while negative reviews can induce losses.’”

“It is now possible for us to prepare guest feedback reports with the click of a button, so that our hotels may use them at any time to secure their quality and manage their reputation.”

“Thanks to Internet review search engine TrustYou, hoteliers are now at all times informed about videos about their properties on YouTube, flickr etc. and can watch them with a single click.”

“There exist solutions that render social media manageable for hoteliers; one example is the cooperation between hotel software specialist protel and TrustYou.”

“‘It is nearly impossible to find the best hotel for each customer by hand’ – For some weeks, travel angency chain RTK has been using TrustYou to find the perfect hotel for everyone.”

“TrustYou: Meta search engine for hotel reviews.”

“Benjamin Jost, CEO and founder of search engine trustyou.com, gives advice on how to respond to online reviews.”

“For the first time the search engine TrustYou was able to quantify the impact of negative reviews on hotels.”

“The first search engine for online reviews analyzed more than half a million guest opinions. The room, service, location and food were among the most rated categories.”

“If, in addition to simple facts, you wish to analyze the ‘soft’ guest opinions of your competition, you need to go for Analytics by TrustYou.”

“The search engine feeds its reviews to corresponding search queries for hotels and restaurants.”

“Every day TrustYou searches ten million hotel reviews on the Internet. The most exciting results are published in the new News Blog: www.trustyou.com/news/blog”

“Hotel rooms are criticized the most in guest reviews on the Internet, according to a study made by TrustYou.com.”

How trustworthy are hotel reviews on the Internet? Benjamin Jost presents TrustYou’s innovative concepts in this interview with German radio station HR4.

“Any cooperation with relevant online partners brings us more traffic, and subsequently also more revenues.”

All opinions at a glance: Users of the online business directory GoYellow will now receive an automatic summary of all internet reviews for given hotels, hostels and restaurants.

TrustYou Analytics, the leading social media management tool for the hotel business, will be used by Toedt, Dr. Selk & Coll. (TS&C) when consulting its clients.

“The cooperation between hotel software specialist protel and TrustYou, the world’s first review meta search engine, is another step on the path to making social media and review portals manageable for hotel managers.”

At the ITB Berlin, the world’s largest tourism convention, representatives of leading travel and media businesses sat together to discuss their future – among them Benjamin Jost of TrustYou, who put classic media in their place:
“With the growing popularity of Internet review portals and recommendations by friends in social media, the pressure on classic advertising models and touristics media is mounting.”

“Web search is evolving, and the next step is called semantic search: A user enters all criteria that he wants a hotel to have, for example, and TrustYou finds the most suitable hotel by analyzing all online reviews.”

“TrustYou will supply HolidayCheck with an overview of all reviews for each hotel. The monitoring of competitors will remain an exclusive feature of TrustYou Analytics.”

“Sales personnel will use the TrustYou seal and statistics to see at a glance how a hotel is perceived by guests. ‘This way, RTK receives the essence of all user reviews of any given hotel.’, says Benjamin Jost of TrustYou.”

“RTK offices will from now on have access to user reviews from TrustYou. Why this should be done by every travel agency in the country.”

“More than 80 percent of reviews on portals such as HRS, TripAdvisor or HolidayCheck are through and through positive. This fact was determiend by TrustYou, a new search engine for internet reviews.”

“Wallis Tourismus uses TrustYou Analytics to find out how guests perceive their region – what they like, but also where improvements are called for. This online image check enables Wallis to develop strategies for its marketing and quality management.”

“A review can be considered trustworthy if all different aspects are critically mentioned.”

“Juliane Fischer of TrustYou advises: ‘It is important to consider many different user reviews.’”

“TrustYou is a meta search engine that allows users to find hotels and restaurants. ‘Only with ten or more reviews will you get a statistically sound impression of a hotel’s quality.’”

“TrustYou tool saves time for hoteliers and steers customer satisfaction.”

“Review portal TrustYou receives new capital.”

“Financial support for TrustYou: ‘TrustYou is a pioneer in the search sector and shows that German companies can keep up with the international competition in terms of technological know-how’.”

“TrustYou is capable to generate hotel recommendations in a few seconds that have been generated from millions of opinions and guest reviews from numerous websites.”

“It becomes possible to search for terms like ‘clean hotel’, ‘quiet room’ or ‘large pool’.”

“Seals of quality like that of TrustYou make it possible to include an image in an online shop that displays the review score of a product.”

“Weg.de cooperates with semantic search engine TrustYou.”

“Of course there exist online services like trustyou.com, which help with this so-called ‘reputation management’.”

“Thanks to the new tool by TrustYou and TNS Infratest, fluctuations in quality and customer needs are immediately detectable.”

“With the semantic search technology of its new affiliate partner TrustYou, weg.de can now find individual hotels faster than before, and inform customers about their service, cleanliness and other categories.”

“From thousands of statements, TrustYou filters the most important positive, neutral and negative opinions and finds suitable hotels.”

“The tool will provide travel agencies and hotel groups with a decision basis for their strategical development.”

“TrustYou closes the gap between classical market research and the more observant approach of monitoring the Web 2.0.”

“TNS Infratest and TrustYou track online hotel reviews.”

“Semantic web meets market research: TrustYou and TNS Infratest develop a joint product for marketing, product & quality management in the travel industry.”

“Mövenpick extends its cooperation with TrustYou. With TrustYou Analytics, the hotal chain will get an overview of its online reviews found in portals, message boards, blogs or communities.”

“The hotel chain will use TrustYou Analytics in 2010 to monitor its online reviews.”

“TrustYou relaunch: The homepage is neat and well-arranged, even though more information is conveyed.”

“Not only one hotel review portal is analyzed, but all relevant portals of the Web 2.0; therefore, the results capture the online reputation of a hotel comprehensively.”

“Going on vacation, but where? … Most surfers might feel inclined to use search engines like Google or Yahoo first, when they could use TrustYou to get to where they want faster.”

“You enter the city of your destination, the kind of hotel you’re looking for and what features are important for you, and you’re presented with a list of hotels suitable to your query.”

“TrustYou is one of the first applications to use semantic technology to analyze hotel reviews and travel destinations.”

“For me, TrustYou is the first step and the first functioning business model of semantic web technology in the tourism business.”

“The Munich-based TrustYou GmbH offers a browser-based software that allows a comprehensive analysis of all hotel reviews.”

“Amazon is able to present a balanced, helpful review that is very helpful in decision making. [...] TrustYou has a nice model of how this could look applied to hotels & the travel industry.”

“There are millions of reviews on the Internet. TrustYou is a search engine that summarizes hotel reviews and lets you search according to your preferences.”

“TrustYou GmbH launches TrustYou Analytics. The browser-based software is intended for hoteliers, hotel cooperations and travel agencies.”

“TrustYou Analytics crawls hotel reviews from different travel portals. The program is based on semantic search technology.”

“Bundled recommendations – TrustYou is a meta search engine that collects reviews of hotels.”

“Can you solve the hotels’ problems, Mr. Jost?”

“From now on, every person looking for a hotel can get an individual overview of all hotels reviewed on the Internet with Germany’s first semantic search engine and thus get to a quick, well-informed booking decision.”

“TrustYou, launched in March 2008, searches hotel offerings that match it’s users’ preferences.”

“Finding the right hotel with ease.”

“The Munich-based TrustYou takes it one step further. In 2009, a software directed at hotel operators is launched. In contrast to keyword-based searches, this software can tell you how many times your dirty carpets have been criticized.”

“The search engine collects opinions and reviews of users that communicate in message boards, communities or in blogs, and generates a quality essence.”

“Now a search engine has launched that wants to summarize all the message boards, blogs, communities and hotel review portals.”

“From millions of comments in blogs, message boards and travel communities, TrustYou filters out the information relevant to you and thus makes planning your vacation easier.”

“Hotel search engine combs through review portals.”

“My highlight of the year is TrustYou GmbH.”

“TrustYou takes it one step further: The startup has developed its semantic software TrustYou Analytics specifically for hotel reviews.”

“TrustYou.com collects the experiences of hotel guests.”

“Travel information you can truly trust”