Industry leaders from Stayntouch, D-Edge, and Duetto came together on May 17, 2023, for a webinar on using technology to drive total profitability.
Bringing together a property management system, central reservation system, and revenue management system to tackle the topic of total profitability, the discussion covered: What is profitability and why does it matter? The importance of understanding costs, including acquisition costs. And the future of profitability.
The panelists were:
- Sabrina Jackson, Senior Director, Product Management, Duetto
- Priya Rajamani, VP of Implementation & Support, Stayntouch
- Jules Prothais, Sales Manager Spain & Latin America and Business Accelerator Digital Media, D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
This blog is a recap of the webinar. To watch the entire discussion on demand, visit https://www.duettocloud.com/webinar-total-profitability-2023
What is profitability and why does it matter?
Priya Rajamani started the topic by stating that profitability maximizes the top and bottom lines.
“It’s understanding what is the total value of a customer? And how is it that you're getting that customer into the hotel door? What is the cost of acquisition? What is the cost of servicing? What is it that you're paying out to your channels that you're getting the customer from? And in contrast with that, understand the value that the customer brings to you, and what is the bottom line thereafter?” she explained.
The importance of understanding costs
Regarding the cost of acquisition and channel information, Sabina Jackson told the audience: “Profitability is all about measuring efficiency. How much revenue are you bringing in, and how much costs are coming out to figure out what is the bottom line? Getting to that information is critical.
“All of your channels and different vendors that you're working with, they're all taking a piece of the pie. Bringing that cost information to revenue teams, GMs, and owners and having it easily viewable will drastically change the way you start thinking about your pricing strategies and your marketing strategies,” she said.
Duetto recently unveiled its CommandCenter, its new actionable business intelligence dashboard. See here for more details: https://www.duettocloud.com/solutions/actionable-business-intelligence
Taking up the topic of costs, Priya Rajamani added: “The costs that you have for customers that are coming directly to you versus the ones that are coming via the various channels that you're paying out to is vastly different, and the goal here is to increase that loyalty, to increase that repetitiveness and to identify channel partners that are most viable and most profitable for you to go down that path.”
What is the future of profitability?
For Jules Prothais it’s all about laundry – a data laundry. Clean data in means clean data out. Here’s how he explained it:
“Do a data laundry around all the profiles you have in your systems. I'm sure that in your hotels you have plenty of John Smiths staying. But you cannot run powerful marketing campaigns to all of these John Smiths if you cannot merge the profiles, and know if John Smith is a high spender or a one-off customer.
“This is the idea of cleaning the database. To come up with unique profiles. So, we know that this John Smith is the very same person that has been spending in Hotel A, B, C, and Z.
“And then we start to dig in. When does he book? Why does he book? Is he interested in golf, tennis, or art? Does he only come for corporate events? If you discover this John Smith is spontaneous and always books last minute, why are you sending him a campaign for next summer? He will never book. If he is spontaneous, give him a last-minute deal.”
The big takeaways
Sabrina Jackson offered up some closing thoughts:
- Hotels need to know what their costs and expenses are.
- Know your guest. Start to figure out who are your ideal guests. Who are the ones that are going to drive profits for you in the future, and make sure that you build campaigns and strategies around them.
- Data quality. Make sure the data in your different systems is clean and usable.
- Leverage insights. Once you've collected all that data and it's flowing through your different systems, it’s about giving tools back to your team to act on this.
Missed the webinar? Don’t worry – you can catch the whole conversation On Demand. Visit https://www.duettocloud.com/webinar-total-profitability-2023 to access the 30-minute recording.