Hotel Tech Report has become the problem it was supposed to solve

Every year around September, my inbox fills with emails from hotel software vendors asking if I’ll leave a review on Hotel Tech Report. Some offer Amazon gift cards. Some offer subscription discounts: leave a review, get 10% off your next renewal. One vendor offered a bottle of wine. The more transparent ones explain that they need a minimum number of reviews before December to qualify for the HotelTechAwards. The less transparent ones just ask for “a quick 5-star review if you have a moment.”

I’ve ignored these emails for years. But over the past twelve months, more and more colleagues have been telling me the same thing: HTR isn’t what it used to be. So I spent a few weeks looking into how the platform actually works now. What I found was worse than I expected.

Hotel Tech Report used to be useful

I want to be fair about this. Hotel Tech Report started as something that made sense. A place where hoteliers could read what other hoteliers thought about software, compare options, and make better decisions. The early version of the site was straightforward. You could browse categories, read reviews, and form an opinion without feeling like you were being sold to.

That version of HTR is gone. What replaced it is a sales platform with a review site bolted on top.

Try using it now

Go to Hotel Tech Report today and try to do independent research. Try to compare three guest messaging tools without giving away your email address, your hotel name, your phone number, and your property size. I’ll wait.

The site is a maze of pop-ups, contact forms, and “get a demo” buttons. Every click feels like it’s trying to harvest your details. And once you hand those over, HTR sells them to whatever vendor is willing to pay the most. Vendors bid against each other for your contact information, and the highest bidder gets you exclusively. The software you end up hearing from isn’t the best fit for your hotel. It’s the one whose sales team paid the most for your click.

The default sort on category pages isn’t by rating. It’s called “Featured Fit,” which shows vendors who paid for premium membership first, then everyone else. A vendor with a lower score but a bigger budget appears above a better-rated competitor. HTR says the score itself isn’t affected by who pays. Maybe. But good luck finding that score under the sponsored placements, banner ads, and buyer’s guide sponsorships.

Try using the site as a hotelier who just wants to compare three tools and make a fair decision. It’s a mess. The whole thing is built to serve the vendors who pay, not the hoteliers trying to make a choice.

Reviews for gift cards and discounts

Hotel Tech Report actively helps vendors run incentivised review campaigns. Their help centre explains how vendors can offer Amazon gift cards in exchange for reviews, with HTR subsidising the cost. The guidance recommends “2 x $100 Amazon gift cards” and suggests setting deadlines to create urgency.

But gift cards are almost quaint now. What I’ve seen more of in the past year is vendors offering subscription discounts tied to leaving reviews. “Leave a review on HTR and get 10% off your next quarter.” “Write about your experience and we’ll waive your setup fee.” The review becomes part of the commercial relationship between vendor and customer. It’s not feedback. It’s a transaction.

At least one major vendor went further still. SiteMinder, in a publicly visible FAQ page for the 2022 HotelTechAwards, described a programme where gift cards were offered specifically for reviews rated 4.0 stars or higher. Reviews below 4 stars didn’t qualify. Employees received prizes based on how many customer reviews they generated. A shared spreadsheet tracked the whole operation.

These are the reviews that form the basis of HTR’s “data-driven” rankings. Solicited by the vendor. Incentivised with gift cards or discounts. Conditional on a minimum positive rating. Tracked in a spreadsheet to hit an awards deadline.

The HotelTechAwards that nobody outside HTR takes seriously

The HotelTechAwards call themselves “the Grammys of Hotel Tech.” Nobody outside HTR calls them that.

Vendors pay $500 per category to enter. From September to December, they campaign their customers for reviews. The vendors with the most reviews and highest scores win. Premium Members get the entry fee waived. A minimum of 25 reviews is needed to compete.

The same companies win every year. Event Temple won five consecutive years. hotelkit won five consecutive years. Canary Technologies swept eight categories in 2025 and nine in 2026. I wrote our Canary Technologies review and scored it a 5 out of 10 for European hotels. HTR gave it nine awards. The difference is that our score came from testing the product at my own properties. Their awards came from a review solicitation campaign backed by $175M in venture capital.

The big-vendor network

This is what HTR has really become: a closed network for big-spending vendors. Browse the site for ten minutes and you’ll see the same names everywhere. Mews. Canary. SiteMinder. Duetto. These are companies with marketing budgets large enough to buy premium placement, sponsor buyer’s guides, run incentivised review campaigns, enter every awards category, and still have money left for banner ads.

Smaller vendors, European vendors, bootstrapped companies building good software on thin margins, they’re invisible unless you already know their name. They can’t compete on a platform where visibility costs money at every level.

And the money goes deep. HTR takes a cut of every sale a vendor makes through the platform, for as long as that customer stays. They sell sponsored articles. They sell buyer’s guide placements. They sell a “Global Support Certification” badge (free for Premium Members, of course). The platform simultaneously ranks vendors, sells advertising to them, takes a percentage of their revenue, charges them to enter awards, and sells them a certification badge.

At some point this stopped being a review site and became a vendor marketplace pretending to be one.

And here’s what bothers me most. When a vendor leans hard on HTR, when they plaster “9x HotelTechAward Winner” across their website and sales deck, it doesn’t make me trust them more. It makes me trust them less. If a vendor’s best argument is an award they won by outspending the competition on a pay-to-play platform, that tells me about their marketing budget, not their product.

Sophie put it well at our last meeting: “If a company spends that much on looking trustworthy, ask yourself why they need to.”

The vendors we’ve rated highest in our own testing tend to be the ones who don’t need a review platform to make their case.

Hotel Tech Report died in 2025

I don’t think there was a single moment. It was a slow collapse. The site got harder to use. The pop-ups got more aggressive. The same vendors kept winning the same awards. The incentivised review campaigns became standard practice rather than something vendors did quietly. The line between “independent platform” and “vendor marketplace” disappeared entirely.

By the end of 2025, Hotel Tech Report had become the thing it was supposed to replace: a pay-to-play directory where rankings reflect budgets, not quality. The original idea, hoteliers helping hoteliers find good software, got buried under layers of monetisation until it stopped being visible.

I know people who work at HTR. I don’t think they set out to build this. But the incentives took over. When your revenue comes from the companies you’re supposed to evaluate, the evaluation stops being the point. The revenue becomes the point. Everything else adjusts around it.

Why we don’t cite them

This is why we never reference Hotel Tech Report scores or awards in our reviews. When Anna evaluates a tool, her judgment comes from reading the data processing agreement and testing the product at her own hotel. Not from a platform where the vendor paid for placement, solicited reviews with subscription discounts, and won awards by outspending the competition.

If you’re still using HTR to shortlist software, at least change the sort from “Featured Fit” to “HT Score.” You’ll see a different list. Then ask yourself why the paid sort is the default.

Better yet, call a colleague. Ask what they actually use. That conversation will tell you more in five minutes than an hour on Hotel Tech Report, clicking through pop-ups and handing over your phone number.