Questions About Hotel Trace

Mostly from public records. Room revenue comes from the hotel tax filings Texas hotels make with the state, and by state law, what they report is public information.

Owners and their mailing addresses come from county appraisal records, and past-due property taxes from county tax records, in the counties that publish them. The people behind an LLC come from the state’s business records, where those records name them. Phone numbers and emails come from a data provider, only when you ask and only where one is on file.

Hotels file with the state each month or each quarter, and the filings take a while to arrive. Monthly filings show up about a month after the month ends, and the full quarterly file follows a couple of months after each quarter closes. We load each one after the state posts it.

So the figures trail the calendar, and each record shows how current they are.

Hotels of the same class and size, close to the one you’re looking at. A full-service hotel is measured against other full-service hotels, not the motel next door, and the short-term rentals, apartments, and RV parks that file the same tax are left out.

So when a hotel shows up as falling behind, it’s falling behind its own kind. When there aren’t enough similar hotels close by, the comparison reaches further, and the record says so.

Wherever the county publishes its records, you get the owner of record, meaning the owner named on the county’s property record, and the address the county mails them at. Most leads carry both. Where the state’s business records name them, you also get the people behind the LLC.

Phone numbers and emails come when you ask for them, where one is on file. Any Do Not Call or litigation flag (a flag for people who have sued over calls) sits beside the number it belongs to, and a litigation flag turns off one-click dialing. If we’re not sure a county record belongs to the hotel, the record says so instead of showing it as fact.

The records we start from are public. By state law, the room revenue a hotel reports to the state is public information, and owner names and mailing addresses come from the property records a county publishes.

Phone numbers and emails are different: they come from a data provider only when you ask, where one is on file, with any Do Not Call or litigation flag beside the number. How your team contacts people is your team’s responsibility. We’re not attorneys, so we can’t advise you on that. If an owner wants their number out of Hotel Trace, they can write to us and we’ll take it out.

Read our Do Not Call policy

Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and College Station. Each one takes in its whole metro, outer counties included, not just the city.

Inside each market, Hotel Trace covers the hotels big enough to carry a management contract, so the smallest motels aren’t in it.

See the markets we cover

No. Every customer sees the same public records, so another company can look up the same hotel. What it can’t see is that you’re working it: your stages, calls, notes, and follow-ups belong to your company, and other customers never see them.

We go over cost on the demo, after you’ve seen what Hotel Trace shows in your own market, so you know what you’d be paying for before we talk numbers. Finding out takes 30 minutes.

The demo is a call on Microsoft Teams. We pull up your market, walk through one hotel’s record from its filings to its owner, and take your questions as we go. If there’s a hotel you’re watching in one of our markets, bring it.