In just over 12 years, Duetto has gone from a consulting service to a revenue-management technology platform with more than 4,000 subscribers. “Simply put, we are helping hotels price their hotel room inventory,” CEO David Woolenberg said.
Hotels typically have a number of different systems from which members of the revenue-management team have to retrieve data to make informed decisions, Woolenberg said. “And so we invest very heavily to create an infrastructure for integrations to really take that friction out of the process, so that revenue managers and the people that are utilizing our systems can really make the most of their data.”
Duetto was developed by a trio of hospitality executives and technology specialists. In mid-2010, Marco Benvenuti and Patrick Bosworth were coworkers at Wynn Resorts as executive director and director of yielding and business strategy, respectively. The two had been using revenue-management technology in those roles but believed they could create something better. They left Wynn and began advising hoteliers and casino managers on revenue management and profit optimization strategies as Duetto Consulting, using spreadsheets in those early days. “But as they had more and more success, they realized they had something there and they wanted to develop a software platform,” Woolenberg said. Craig Weissman, the former CTO of Salesforce.com, came onboard as the third co-founder and CTO in early 2012. The following month, the first line of code was written for Duetto Edge, and the company had a new software-as-a-service application it could sell to hoteliers.
“We're really known for helping hotels make the most of the data that surrounds the hotel and taking the data out of the systems that they use to make that data actionable to drive more revenue and profitability,” Woolenberg said.
Growing and Adapting
Maintaining its roots in the casino world, Duetto launched GameChanger Revenue Strategy Solution in 2014 to support price optimization, loyalty and forecasting capabilities in casino hotels. The platform initially was built to help maintain loyalty among high rollers, determining the prospective gaming and nongaming revenue potential of each guest.
Duetto’s first big expansion, Chief Product Officer Darren Koch said, was adding business-intelligence capabilities, like the platform’s reporting infrastructure combined with the capability to bridge between the revenue-management department and finance department to build and manage budgets. “Those combined to create a product that we call ScoreBoard,” Koch said. “So you have revenue management and finance coming together using the same data to manage the business.” The platform launched in 2016.
The next step after that was bringing sales into the fold, which the company accomplished with its Blockbuster platform, an application launched in 2017 to support collaboration between a hotel’s sales and revenue-management teams. The app aims to help the combined teams close more contracted deals at higher average daily rates.
Benefits of the Cloud
A top reason for hoteliers to select cloud-based systems is the ease of upgrades, Koch said. “We release software internally once or twice a day, so you can imagine the magnitude of changes going into the system all the time. And we take all that burden from our customers so that they're always getting consistent delivery of innovation” The platform’s algorithms then help customers make better business decisions, which drives a feedback loop that consistently improves the software, Woolenberg added.
The updates have been frequent: In May, Duetto added new features for GameChanger, with new rate management experience features designed to consolidate all rate publishing pages into one unified view.
ScoreBoard, meanwhile, recently added a new forecast and budget builder to help revenue managers, finance and operations teams generate forecasts and budgets at the property, brand or corporate level.
Next steps include further investment into analytics. “What we're doing on the analytic side is a continuation of what we've been doing since our founding,” Koch said. “It's using the data that's available and using the latest analytic techniques to figure out what's important for our customers and how they can use that to more effectively run their business.”
Logic in Logistics
Duetto has been constantly expanding since its founding—in fact, Woolenberg said, the company now has more people than it did a year ago. “We've really added and invested heavily in our human capital, and so we have a much broader team ... We really now have a truly global organization.” Koch said that because of the remote environment, Duetto has been able to bring in more people into the company’s strategy and planning conversations. As such, he said, the company has pivoted “really effectively” to support collaboration among people in different time zones—“which has been instrumental in bringing a lot of this innovation to life, whether it's the engineers coding or it's connecting with our customer-facing teams in Europe and Asia to really look at what's going on on our customer sites, what's on their mind, and how we can add the most value.”
Clicking with Clients
As travel restrictions have eased, Duetto’s team members have resumed traveling to meet with clients and find new ones at trade shows. “It really depends on where the customers and hoteliers are in their journey,” Woolenberg said. “Depending on where they might be in the world, there may be different restrictions ... If a customer wants to meet us in person, we figure out a way to do that. And if they want to meet either through Zoom or Google Meet or whatever, we do that. So I think we've been really effective and productive in terms of adapting to the new environment.”