Noble House Hotels & Resorts operates a collection of independent lifestyle resorts, hotels, and restaurants throughout the United States and Canada. The owner/operator is also one of the six founding partners of the Curator Hotel & Resort Collection, which was founded in 2020.
As such, the Noble House portfolio runs its revenue on Duetto.
This blog is an extract from our latest eBook: Revenue Strategy For Independent Hotels: How Technology Helps You Compete. Download your free copy today: https://www.duettocloud.com/special-reports/how-technology-helps-you-compete
Noble House started moving its portfolio to Duetto in early 2021, once the company’s contract with its legacy revenue systems provider expired.
Darrell Stark, VP of Revenue Management & Distribution at Noble House Hotels & Resorts, oversaw the project.
“The biggest concern was the unknown for the users. They had been using a legacy system for a long time,” Stark commented.
Looking back on the implementation and decision-making process to adopt Duetto, Stark remarked: “The only thing we would've done differently is probably try to start the process a little sooner.”
Moving away from a legacy provider and adopting a cloud-based RMS was a big decision for the leadership at Noble House. The team was looking for more breadth from its revenue solutions provider, and Duetto features such as tracking website traffic regrets and denials were a big factor in the decision-making process.
“There are a couple of things that really separated this product. One was the ease of use. That was huge. Not only from the revenue management side, but really from the group evaluation side,” said Stark.
“And then there is tracking that can be embedded into a website, which is one of the things I think that we have always been missing. To be able to track what's happening on your website, and understand what happened in the funnel, that's huge. That was a big game changer for us,” Stark added.
Hotels working under the Curator umbrella benefit from best-in-class operating agreements, services, and technology. Noble House Hotels & Resorts properties benefit from the Duetto / Curator partnership agreement for revenue solutions.
One such property is The Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. The 223-room, four-star property, famous for hosting The Beatles when they visited Seattle in 1964, has been a quick adopter of both Duetto’s solutions and the benefits that come from being part of the Curator collection.
“Our goal is to make lasting improvements so we can grow the business the right way. This is not the easiest industry to be in and we want to be careful with what we do. Consistency is huge and leveraging the Curator program is important,” said Ian McClendon, General Manager at The Edgewater Hotel, part of the Noble House Hotels & Resorts portfolio.
“The long-term gains of having one streamlined platform that all our properties use will be very beneficial. And it really makes our lives a lot easier.”
Ian McClendon explained how Duetto is helping teams across the property to work more efficiently. The revenue team is now more efficient and can spend more time collaborating with leadership and sales and marketing, rather than just crunching numbers. The sales team can more easily find out about rates and pull information, helping them win more customers.
“What Duetto does is apply pressure the right way for us just to make sure that we have our ducks lined up. We really need to make sure that we're thinking about our compression dates and having a dialled-in compression calendar,” McClendon said.
Rebecca Elder, Regional Director of Revenue Management, Edgewater Hotel, Noble House Hotels & Resorts, is an end-user for Duetto. For her, having a system that was flexible enough to work with their complex room segmentation and that could encapsulate their groups business, was vital.
“Our hotels are unique; in that we have hotels within a hotel. Between midweek and weekend, we have very different guests that could be corporate or group midweek, and weekends it's leisure guests that are looking for that weekend getaway. And we have distinct view types within the hotel. So, we're always looking for the opportunity to manage these higher-end room types and suites that have gorgeous views. The question was always ‘how do we leverage that?’,” she explained.
For Elder, the Duetto BlockBuster group optimization feature is a big pull.
“We wanted to have a great module to evaluate our groups as business travel continues to return. That's a very important part for us. I'm excited about Blockbuster. It will be a great feature for our group team,” she added.
Taking on new tech is a big step. And for Noble House Hotels & Resorts taking this decision during the market uncertainty surrounding the COVID pandemic was a very brave decision. But the team was certain of the rewards.
For other hotels considering the switch, Elder offers this advice: “Have a very clear idea of your objectives, and what the unique features of your property are, to ensure that your needs are met. Be very clear about your training, and get the users involved, whether that's through your group users, with BlockBuster, or any of your analysts. Really take the time to educate your team so they understand how the product is supposed to work, and that you're working in collaboration throughout the hotel.
“Have a strategy for your higher-end room types, be completely independent of your base level room types, and really get into the micromanagement of the different features that you have within the hotel, be that queen beds in summer, or suites during a compression time,” Elder explained.
Stark was responsible for the roll-out of Duetto. Now it’s up and running, his feedback on why Noble House chose Duetto is: “It is a system that's designed to allow the user to have influence in it. It's a system that's designed to make it easier for the user to identify what is the recommendation that's there, but also at multiple levels, to be able to really integrate user recommendation with system recommendation. And you don't have to come up and be creative in how you get the system to implement that. You have control to be able to do it. And in our environments, the way that our room types are established at many of our hotels, that's a very important thing for us to be able to do.”
Discover more about how Duetto works with independent hotels in our latest Special Report: Revenue Strategy For Independent Hotels: How Technology Helps You Compete. Download your free copy today: https://www.duettocloud.com/special-reports/how-technology-helps-you-compete