RateGain Unveils Travel Branding Tool at HITEC 2011

In cutting edge travel technology bits, RateGain has launched their BrandGain guest satisfaction technology at HITEC 2011 in Austin, Texas. According to their news, the BrainGain technology extracts, scans, analyzes, and scores across the social spectrum providing crucial analytics for users.

As anyone involved in “the digital revolution” should know by now, the sphere of engagement online is all about two way communication. Tools that help communicate customer perception and ideas are, for the lack of a better term, the Holy Grail of B2C engagement. That is, if they actually work. What RateGain appears to have some up with is a very useful branding and marketing tool.

Being able to confidently and credibly extrapolate user feedback in all its forms, this is what RateGain approaches. Put simply, converting online travel customers with “trust data” – this is where TripAdvisor started, and the winner of the online travel game will end. A tool like RateGain, if properly deployed and marketed, could be a game changer. Let me show the reader how.

The list below is from RateGain’s PRNewswire press release:

• Identifies key guest satisfaction trends and analyzes competitor guest satisfaction performance in multiple languages.
• Advanced web extraction engine extracts, scans, analyzes and scores comments and reviews on almost all popular consumer review sites, social media sites, online travel sites, blogs as well as new media sites.
• Its advanced semantic engine analyzes & categorizes the information very similar to how a human brain perceives.
• Offers customized views for property level & enterprise level.
• Easy to read dashboards for detailed reporting and analysis for brand wide performance or by City/Country/Region level.
• Competitor benchmarking on guest satisfaction with innovative measurement of Compset Satisfaction Index across any aggregation of properties.

Your company, no matter how small, employs PR and Marketing. You may even not know this, believe you get by without it, but your brand is out there, believe me. Our PR element has represented some of the most cutting edge Web 2.0 developments in the world, branding is “existing” – especially online. Just how your company is seen (first), engages (second), and is perceived (ongoing) is where the dollar signs start to sparkle – to be blunt.

The heatmap (image above) reveals one element of RateGain’s BrandGain technology. What RateGain is doing with their technologies is clearly refining analytics, social engagement, and conversions for clients – at least they are headed that way. BrandGain is the next logical step in their overall development. Looking at the deep analytical matrixes of BrandGain (keyword analysis below), at least RateGain’s understanding of social improvement becomes clear.

Building a complete hospitality suite cannot be a simple task, but RateGain seems determined to blanket the spectrum. With ChannelGain hoteliers can effectively manage  their online inventory distribution. With rumbido (released last year), RateGain’s initial installment of social genius, service providers can engage via social sharing incentives etc. With NetReports your hotel can monitor competitor rates across the retail, OTA, agent, and wholesale travel commodity spectrum – this is really powerful if you think about it. And, with PriceGainAir, Hotel, and Audit RateGain users can monitor and effect almost immediate change via razor’s edge technologies.

We will be contacting RateGain to see about doing in depth testing of these products, but for now the “innovation” is in the concept, if not in the actual products. From what I can tell of RateGain’s other products, there is no reason to believe they have not created a truly riveting tool here. More on this later.

For those who do not know, HITEC is the world’s largest hospitality technology show, which runs through tomorrow. Please refer to the RateGain website for further info, or perhaps their Facebook pages or Twitter account.

For those unfamiliar with RateGain’s award winning SME efforts in travel, the video below should fill in some blanks.