The Remington Orange is an 82-room hotel located in New South Wales, Australia. The hotel went live with Duetto in April 2023. Within the first month, Hotel Manager, Alex Tran – confessed ‘jack-of-all-trades’ at the property – was already seeing phenomenal results. He provides us with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ look at his revenue strategy, and talks about how Open Pricing has blown his mind.
Before Duetto
The Remington Orange opened in December 2020. It is the second luxury regional hotel in the Remington portfolio. The hotel boasts 82 rooms and suites, as well as event spaces for corporate conferences and weddings. The hotel is located close to Orange Airport and is 3.5 hours drive from both Sydney and Canberra.
- 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-revenue
As a pre-opening property, Tran’s revenue priority was to build a foothold in the market and gain occupancy. ADR was simply seen as a bonus.
“My hotel career had been mostly operation-centric and whilst I would like to believe I had a revenue strategy, it was purely reactionary and a self-learning process,” admitted Tran.
“I would describe our revenue setup as relatively standard: static discounts with discounted rate codes opening and closing with occupancy. BAR was static as well. This forced me to react to spikes in occupancy and demands manually. STLY or STLW reports were also done manually.”
“Time-consuming and user-unfriendly”
Groups are a big part of The Remington Orange’s business, yet before implementing Duetto’s BlockBuster group optimization tool, Tran admits block quotes were done on a “feel” basis.
“Whilst I am confident in my rate quoting, I needed a better way to teach my staff to do so to prevent an operational bottleneck at my doorstep,” he said.
“Whenever I would see a cluster of room pick-ups for the same date, I would go into the Opera Cloud Admin and increase my rate. This was a time-consuming and user-unfriendly process. I also did not have the time to micro-manage my rates beyond 45 days from the stay date, which led to a potential loss of revenue in the long term.
“Comp set comparison was too time-consuming and therefore left aside. I needed a better way to track my comp sets,” he added.
Introducing Duetto
Tran brought on Duetto to help him automate the hotel’s pricing, enabling it to react to changes in occupancy and demand.
Within a month of onboarding, The Remington Orange was already seeing substantial revenue increases as well as enjoying team efficiencies.
“May was the first full month with Duetto and we saw fantastic results. Both April and May finished at 50% occupancy, so it is virtually an apple-to-apple comparison. ADR went from $217.08 to $238.73, and I would credit a huge portion of that to how much more aggressive we were able to be with Duetto,” Tran said.
Duetto has helped the hotel deliver a more dynamic and creative revenue strategy, achieving a 10% uplift in ADR in the first month of operating.
Tran deployed several new revenue strategies, including:
- Room type differentials dynamic based on availability;
- Discounted rates dynamic based on occupancy;
- OTA rates are also now dynamic based on occupancy to help reduce the commission cost at higher demand periods.
“These strategies were never possible for me before using Duetto, as I would not have the time to micromanage a strategy of such complexity. Duetto essentially saved me a full-time salary point,” Tran explained.
“The beauty about this increase is that it came at almost no increased operational cost and is therefore almost pure profit. It will be interesting to see how far I can push my revenue across the entire calendar year.”
Competing With OTAs Using Open Pricing
Despite limited revenue management experience, Tran was quick to see the benefits of Open Pricing.
“Open Pricing as a concept blew my mind. This is where my relative inexperience in the revenue management field is showing. Having said that, it is a credit to the Duetto UI team that such a complex concept is broken down so seamlessly that even a relative newbie like myself can grab hold of it and run with it,” Tran said.
One of the biggest opportunities for Tran was using Duetto’s Open Pricing methodology to go “toe-to-toe with the OTAs.”
“I am now able to keep my inventory on OTA, but I am much more in control of the rate presented there and steer traffic towards my direct sources much better,” Tran explained.
“As with many hotels, OTA is one of our strongest performing segments. However, I am now able to fully control the rate shown on OTAs based on my occupancy. This leads to either a scenario where guests would book on OTA at an inflated price or they would go direct at a lower price. Win/Win.
“Additionally, I am now much more able to control promotions on my OTA by treating it as a separate segment. This means that I can chase occupancy through aggressive promotions when required (for example, under a certain occupancy threshold) or seamlessly pivot to an ADR chasing strategy after said threshold,” Tran added.
“Open Pricing has allowed me to maximize revenue at the smallest level - such as Room Type rate differentials. However, as it is simply automation, there is no time cost attached to the extra revenue beyond the setup time. All the little revenue boost does add up quite quickly.”
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.