Gruppo UNA is an iconic Italian chain with 52 properties located across Italy, from city center destinations to rural retreats and coastal idylls.
Gruppo UNA's strength is its distinctive Italian character, and its portfolio comprises the three brands UNA Esperienze, UNAHOTELS, and UNAWAY that best represent three ways of experiencing hospitality, aimed at the upper-upscale, upscale, and smart segments respectively.
The group signed its directly managed properties onto Duetto in 2022.
“We chose Duetto because it is the most dynamic in the market and the most user-friendly. It is a solution that helps you dynamically manage your room pricing but also helps with total profit management,” said Luca Vallasciani, Director of Revenue, Gruppo UNA.
This blog is an excerpt from our latest special report, How Hotels Use Open Pricing to Optimize Revenue. Download your free copy here: https://www.duettocloud.com/special-reports/how-hotels-use-open-pricing-to-optimize-revenueVallasciani heads up the entire revenue operation at Gruppo UNA. For the managed properties, this is very much centralized out of the company’s head office in Milan. A team of cluster revenue managers are overseeing all directly managed properties.
“All of our revenue managers look after a cluster of hotels. Therefore, one of the reasons why we wanted to go with an RMS was to ensure everybody had the same tools and could move from working on one hotel to another without thinking about how the tools change. The only thing that changes is the trends and behaviors of the single hotels, not the tools,” Vallasciani explained.
Offering such a wide selection of properties – from conference center hotels to luxury resorts - the group also has a wide guest demographic. Business hotels attract a more domestic market, while tourist hot spots such as Venice and Rome attract more international demand.
As such, the commercial strategies vary depending on the hotel type.
“When looking at our commercial and marketing strategies, we take into account the peculiarities of each hotel. So, strategies are clustered by group or type of hotel,” Vallasciani explained.
“In some properties, non-room revenue reaches almost 40% of the total revenue. If we are just looking at room revenue, we are missing a big part of the cake. We love that BlockBuster lets us compare displacement using the total revenue and not just rooms. This will help us a lot in driving total profitability.”
Adopting Open Pricing
Part of the Duetto onboarding involved training the whole team on the system and Open Pricing.
“The onboarding was smooth for the connectivity part. I was impressed by the way the team brought us to the goal. We just had to follow the instructions,” said Vallasciani.
Before adopting Duetto’s Open Pricing methodology, Vallasciani and his team were using spreadsheets for their analysis and working manually in the PMS to select and set rates. The hotels had only two or three different discounts that they were offering, and the revenue manager had to go in and choose these daily. Once the hotels were onboard with Duetto this process became dynamic and automated, with Vallasciani now expanding this out to all rate codes and segments.
“As soon as we saw the potential of Duetto we expanded Open Pricing to all our other rates that were not dynamic. We want all rate codes and all segments to be completely dynamic now,” said Vallasciani.
“In the early days, the algorithm still needs to learn how every single hotel and its market works. But, once it recognizes that the demand is high or low, the reaction of the system is exactly what we expected, and where we want to go.”
“What I enjoy most about using Duetto is Open Pricing; the possibility to have a very flexible and dynamic way to manage pricing. And the second thing is that the revenue strategy platform enables me to manage all the revenue strategies in one place and dynamically work on micro market segmentation. So, I don't need to do one part of the job in the channel manager and another part in the PMS.
Discover how Open Pricing is driving revenue at hotels running on Duetto. Check out the many case studies in our latest eBook, How Hotels Use Open Pricing to Optimize Revenue. Download now.