On April 1, 2021, I joined the Duetto team as SVP of Global Sales with a remit to help grow our customer and partner base throughout our various global sales units: North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC.
What a six weeks it has been!
And what a time to re-engage with the wonderful world of hospitality.
Why Duetto?
I’ve been working in and around the travel sector for more than two decades and in that time I’ve worked closely with the hotels industry. In fact, I started my career in hotels – working on multi-segment sales. In my on-property roles, I would often have very direct engagement with the revenue team. So, for me, this role with Duetto is almost a homecoming.
But on the flip side of that, there’s a frisson of something new and unexplored.
I get a strong sense that this is a relatively underdeveloped area of business – and that’s backed up by the fact that the majority of hotels worldwide don’t operate a revenue management system (RMS). There is a relationship between revenue, marketing, profile management, and front of house that is unexplored in the market. This retail sequence hasn’t really been understood or capitalized on – and that is what Duetto is exploring.
Why jump into hotel tech right now?
I’ve been asked that a lot recently! After all, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the travel and hospitality industries the hardest.
Looking beyond this I can see years of opportunity ahead of us.
Hotel tech is still an open market filled with lots of different players and subcategories. There’s opportunity for a lot more integration and co-operative practice, and I see a huge opportunity in creating a cohesive ecosystem of tech partnerships and I am excited about the role Duetto can play here.
Looking at the retail sequence and hotel tech systems, we have still got a PMS, CRS, back office, all creating an endless array of different profiles.
Consider a traveler making a booking to stay in a city center hotel. During the course of making that booking, the consumer may have a profile on a distribution channel, credit card, PMS, RMS, etc. There are so many different ways of looking at that guest and that in itself presents huge opportunities.
To intelligently analyze and forecast patterns in behaviors linked to the deployment of revenue and strategy will be a key development in travel moving forward.
The intelligent way we use data and behavior patterns will make that success. And that is why hotel tech is so attractive right now. We are at that confluence of different perspectives: management, revenue, profile, behavior, integration, opportunity. It’s all there!
Success will come down to how companies like us take the opportunity to enhance performance and drive engagement from hotels in a way that doesn’t require a massive outlay in personnel and old-fashioned selling technology and massive distribution costs. We are at the point where sales and revenue relationships meet.
Team Duetto
Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with or at Duetto will tell you how amazing the corporate culture is here. And now I am on the inside I can only extol on that.
The intelligent individuality of all the people I’ve met is very attractive. Duetto creates an atmosphere of constructive engagement. We are positive even when we are confronted with a serious situation. We look for solutions not faults, and that’s a really powerful statement to make about an organization, especially right now.
We are curious. We want to understand things. And we’re also intelligent and that means we are people who create solutions.
We are commercially transparent. The offerings we make are without a hidden agenda. No secret fees, we do ‘what it says on the tin’.
We don’t give up. We’re a tenacious bunch of people.
We are a community – you are almost overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome.
Arriving at Duetto is like landing in a new country – that feeling of arriving in a new frontier with all the potential and all the opportunity in front of us.
Interested in becoming a part of the Duetto community? Check out our Careers Page for our current openings.