As the annual HITEC conference kicks off in Orlando this week, revenue-management technology firm Duetto shared updates on how the company is evolving to help hoteliers deploy profitable strategies and drive customer value.
In April, Duetto launched an integration with upselling platform Oaky that delivers analytically powered targeted upgrade offers to guests. The integrated solution is designed to yield 45 percent higher guest spend per upgraded night and puts hotel guests on an “upgrade experience path” that offers them premium rooms “at a premium price,” said Darren Koch, Duetto's chief product officer.
In May, the company added new rate management experience features for its GameChanger Revenue Strategy Solution to consolidate all rate publishing pages into one unified view.
The newest features and innovations in its GameChanger and ScoreBoard applications are the release of New Rate Management Experience and Forecast & Budget Builder, respectively.
New Additions
The New Rate Management Experience is designed to remove complexity around determining rate at the property level, Duetto CEO David Woolenberg said, explaining that with a streamlined system, hoteliers can tailor their strategies to their own needs. “They can automate some of the things that … aren't going to move a lot in any given day or period of time,” he said. “But then they can also use manual controls … to really hone in on their unique strategy and effectively execute on it.”
Another new development is what Koch called a “complete ground-up rebuild of the front end, the [user experience], the screens that our users see to manage rates.” This page, which the company calls the Command Center, aggregates data from all of a client’s owned properties into one screen, making it easier to “effectively manage by exception.” The page “highlights all the important opportunities that you have across your hotel—or across a portfolio of hotels—so that you can take effective action really quickly,” Koch said. “Everything's one click away.”
The new Dynamic Optimization feature monitors everything going on across the individual hotel and the broader hotel market demand landscape and takes action as soon as something changes that could affect pricing. “So imagine a big event is announced or a large group cancels or large group books, a spike in cancellations—any of these things that are anomalies … present an opportunity for our customers,” Koch said. The system can then take action on the owner’s behalf.
A core feature of the system, Koch said, is the platform’s ability to connect to the tech stack that exists for Duetto’s customers and bring that data into its central system. “By bringing all of that together in real time and monitoring it, we're able to feed some data science algorithms that look for outliers. And so the data science algorithms are in the system, constantly monitoring for things that are out of the ordinary. And when we find them, we trigger a reprice. Effectively, we go back through and say, ‘Do we believe our forecast is accurate or has something changed?’” If something has, indeed, changed, the prices can adjust as needed.
In Q3 of this year, Duetto is set to launch its new Forecast & Budget Builder for ScoreBoard. The new additions are designed to help revenue managers, finance and operations teams generate forecasts and budgets, with customizable views and template standardization and management. “Comparing 2020 over 2019 was impossible,” Koch said of the challenges of forecasting in volatile times, and noted that comparing 2021 with 2020 was similarly difficult. “And so largely it comes down to—how do we look at the past to predict the future? And how do we take references that help us be accurate in our forecasting?” With that in mind, he said, blending more short-term patterns “has been a key point for us.”
“The ability for Duetto to have the flexibility to do shorter look-back dates—same time last week, same time last month, or a custom time frames that our customers want to use—that type of flexibility really helped them adapt and react in a really effective way as we've gone through these very volatile times,” Woolenberg said.