Leading hotel brands across the globe such as Meliá Hotels International, The Standard, London, and RCD Hotels, partner with Duetto for intelligent revenue management solutions that amplify efficiency and revenue, and increase conversion and guest loyalty.
Duetto’s cloud-based room pricing, forecasting, reporting and group pricing applications give hoteliers the power to innovate their entire approach to hotel revenue management. By utilizing Duetto’s Open Pricing methodology, hoteliers are able to price all stay dates, distribution channels, room types and customer segments separately, boosting revenue whilst keeping booking opportunities open.
With total automation, Duetto saves hotel brands valuable time, effort and resources when running and creating reports for hotel stakeholders, and dynamic and forward-looking analytics provide accurate rate recommendations for properties for up to five years into the future.
Let’s take a look at how three hotel brands work with Duetto for their innovative revenue management:
Meliá Hotels International
Meliá Hotels International is a leader in the hospitality industry, operating many luxury brands, including Gran Meliá, ME by Meliá, The Meliá Collection and Paradisus by Meliá.
Meliá onboarded with Duetto in August 2017 with its first property going live with the software in January 2018. Today, the company runs revenue for nearly 200 hotels through the Duetto Revenue Strategy Platform.
Thomas Adler, Vice President of Global Revenue Strategy for Meliá Hotels International, commented: “Meliá’s Revenue Strategy includes next-generation pricing and distribution tactics, the digitization of its loyalty program and a movement toward personalizing the guest experience from booking to post-stay, leading to optimizing the customer experience and to offering the best personalized value proposals for specific audiences.”
Outlining how rolling out an enterprise-level revenue management system has helped Meliá Hotels International with its commercial strategy, Adler said: “Our portfolio includes urban hotels but also holiday hotels. We have managed to dynamize our tour operators’ segment by implementing dynamic prices for tour operators, especially in holiday hotels, with a revenue management team managing the demand in an agile way.
“We have quite a few centralized tools, including Duetto. We have created a model that is a mix between corporate teams and revenue managers in destination, which gives the possibility of having a strategy with corporate guidance as well as a local revenue management team based on property.”
He added: “This gives us a general and specific vision of the destination, and we can adapt the corporate strategy (local power with the corporate strategic guidance).”
Sharing some best practices for hotel chains who are looking to deploy a revenue management system at the enterprise revenue level, Adler said: “As for any project, define a task force team, plan all the steps and then roll it out.”
He added: “Part of the planning stage involves harmonizing as much as possible the various codes and configuration standards across the portfolio to ease rollout and usage. At a corporate level, define corporate rules for the RMS. The hotel group pricing strategy doesn’t need to change.”
The Standard
The Standard offers a collection of trendy boutique hotels in stylish city center destinations, with hotels in New York, London, Bangkok, Miami Beach, and more. This stylish collection has been working with Duetto since 2014, with 17 hotels now live in the system.
In New York, The Standard operates two properties: East Village, NYC and High Line, NYC. Both properties regularly exceed budget and targets for ADR and occupancy and have seen STR results better than 2019 in recent years.
“Revenue management is like a symphony. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, everything needs to play at the right time, volume, rhythm to make a beautiful song. You need to ensure that every channel, every rate code, every market segment, is playing at the right time, at the right rhythm to keep revenue optimized. Tools like GameChanger and ScoreBoard help revenue professionals like myself create a beautiful symphony,” said Jelissa Toro, Regional Director of Revenue Management.
The Standard, London was the first international property from The Standard, opening its doors in July 2019.
Six months after opening the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and after navigating its way through two closures the hotel was finally able to re-open on May 17, 2021. Closing so soon after opening meant that The Standard, London had only six months of data to pull from, making revenue management a challenge to say the least.
“I was very pleased Duetto brought in the short-term forecasting reports, enabling us to compare pick up trends from the latest four weeks versus the last 10 weeks, and exclude STLY data. It has been extremely helpful for us to establish short-term trends and helped us with our pricing strategy,” said Amrita Makkar, Director of Revenue Management at The Standard, London, speaking to Duetto in July 2021.
“I like that Duetto can monitor future demand and I can set pricing rules based on demand occupancy rather than committed occupancy on the books. Room type pricing rules allow a great degree of flexibility. I set my rules based on the remaining rooms in a room type. The popular room types can change based on seasonality or even now with the pandemic the rooms with outside space are more popular,” she explained.
RCD Hotels
RCD Hotels contracted with Duetto in early 2019, implementing the cloud-based revenue strategy platform across its entire portfolio of all-inclusive resorts, including its inaugural Nobu property, Nobu Los Cabos.
The group has seen a lot of differences since onboarding with Duetto, as Lourdes Ancona, Revenue Management Corporate Director, RCD Hotels, explained. “One of my first tasks as Corporate Director of Revenue Management was to find a very good revenue system that would suit our hotels, both on all-inclusive and European plans. We visited, met, and analyzed different RMS and in the end, we went for Duetto.
“We researched hotels that were already using Duetto. And for me, one of the most important parts, in addition to everything else, is that it has an accurate forecast. That is something we didn't find in the system we had or in other systems we were investigating.”
She added: “In addition to all the advantages, such as Open Pricing, and connectivity with other channel managers, the fact that we can change the rates for a single day is amazing.”
And the results? Well they speak for themselves. “Today, we are one of the fastest growing, best performing, and most innovative companies in the industry in Mexico and, I would venture to say, in the world. And we manage to have the best fares, the best occupancies, and, consequently, the best RevPAR of our destinations,” Ancona said.
Learn more about how Duetto collaborates with leading hotel brands here: https://www.duettocloud.com/customers/hotels