Matthias Heel joined Duetto as Director of Hospitality Solutions in February. Having spent six years working with Duetto in various revenue leadership roles at hotels across Europe, Matthias is best placed to work with clients to help them understand the many features of the Duetto Revenue Strategy Platform. He has, after all, definitely walked the talk!
Here, we catch up with him to find out more about his career path, what attracted him to swap a role in hotels for hotel technology, and his advice for anyone looking to make the same move.
Tell us a little about your career prior to joining Duetto?
I’ve actually spent the last six years working with Duetto, first at Victor's Residenz and more recently at Ruby Hotels. In both companies I was looking after revenue, reservations and groups department and liaising with marketing and sales to increase total revenue. And as such I had the opportunity to learn a lot about how to use Duetto.
With Victor's I got involved in updating their tech stack and looking for new ways to increase revenue. At Ruby Hotels, as a new brand, I was involved in setting up revenue and commercial calls.
How much of a difference did using Duetto make to you as a Director of Revenue?
In both those previous roles, using Duetto made my life a lot easier. It’s really tricky to find good revenue staff and Duetto helped us work on our efficiency, to increase the amount of hotels being handled by each person.
When it comes to handling data, you are never going to do it as well as the platform. It takes far too long to be copying data, there are too many sources, and it’s too time consuming.
The Duetto algorithm compares certain days and established booking curves. It helps you to make very fast decisions.
What attracted you to swapping hotels for hotel tech?
At the very beginning of my career, when I had the opportunity to move to the discipline of revenue management, my mentor told me ‘It’s all about systems’. This hasn’t changed. It really is all about systems. If you have a good system and it has a good fit into your tech stack, then you can do property revenue management.
Now you’re part of Team Duetto, what has most surprised you about joining the company?
What I find surprising is that Duetto has managed to continue to bring all employees together during COVID with meetings and the way we use apps such as Slack. Considering I don’t know most of these people yet, it feels like we are really close together.
We are very client centric. As an ex hotelier, the guest was always at the center of everything you do. At Duetto it’s the same and that is really cool. Everyone understands we need to look at what the client is looking for and how we can better serve him. That’s very powerful and very unique.
Then there’s the language. We are an RMS but we don’t talk like a conservative software consultant, we talk to our clients like a friend. I like that approach very much.
What has most excited you about the latest Duetto product release?
We now can pull the pick up data on the ‘all properties section’, which is really powerful. If you have more than a few hotels you need to do that reporting. All the things you can do for one hotel can now be done for a group of hotels. You can also group them into different destinations.
I love the ability to exclude the zero lines in the reporting because if you do a rate code production and certain dates don’t have any production it’s a long list and is difficult to analyze.
What one piece of advice would you give to anyone looking to make a career change and get into hotel tech right now?
For me to be very honest that was an easy one because I knew Duetto. This was a system I have been working with and I know of the power of Duetto. My advice would be, if you can, choose a software that you like, that you know and feel comfortable to talk about. I’ve been using the system and I know what can be done.
Looking to make a career move into hotel tech? Check out our current open positions on our Careers page: https://www.duettocloud.com/careers