Introducing Staypineapple
Staypineapple is a unique collection of iconic hotels in key locations across the US such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The company prides itself on offering ‘out of the ordinary hotels, in extraordinary locations’, with each of its ten properties offering a pineapple-themed room, core welcome drink, and unique features such as ‘The Naked Experience’.
Before adopting Duetto, Staypineapple’s revenue management set-up was entirely manual. The revenue team was using Excel spreadsheets to track pick up and segmentation, reviewing and entering price changes directly into the PMS.
Efficiency During Time Of Growth
Staypineapple approached Duetto to drive efficiency back in 2014. Prior to Duetto, the company had just four hotels in operation, increasing to ten during implementation, with plans to grow.
The hospitality company needed one source of truth that multiple departments could all access. Duetto’s functionality and flexibility, delivered in an easy and intuitive user interface, were big draws for Staypineapple. The replacement of tasks like an operational occupancy forecast for the next two weeks to help with scheduling has freed up a lot of time to focus more on long-term strategy.
Speaking with Rebecca McElroy, Director of Revenue Management at Staypineapple, it's clear to see the impact:
“Many systems can incorporate factors to recommend pricing, but one of the things I love about Duetto is that when we change room types or segmentation it’s not a complete headache to update the RMS.”
“Dynamic discounts have fundamentally changed the way we are offering corporate rates to small and medium-sized companies.”
The Onboarding Process
The flexibility that Duetto gives to change how room types or segments are classified was a big boost for Staypineapple. Having someone on hand to talk the team through the whole process was a big advantage.
“This was one of the easier onboarding processes I’ve gone through,” said Steven Allison, Chief Revenue Officer at Staypineapple. “The fact that we had someone helping us understand the questions and fields to be filled out was very helpful. Our contact was very accessible and talked through what the information was used for, and what common issues or errors were for other hotels so that we could decide what made sense for us.”
Immediate Impact
In terms of efficiency, the results were immediate because the revenue team no longer had to create manual spreadsheets, run reports from a PMS, and populate the data before even looking into what it was telling them.
For maximizing revenue, the results were visible in 3-6 months. Out of all Staypineapple’s properties, their stabilized hotels have performed better because of Duetto’s use of historical trends.
Rebecca commented, “The optimizations occurring multiple times a day kept pricing in line with the market and/or our comp set much better than I could have.”
The Results
- +0.7% ADR year-on-year
- +9.5% RevPAR year-on-year
- +8.8% occupancy year-on-year
Reflecting on their success, Steven added:
“Dynamic discounts have fundamentally changed the way we are offering corporate rates to small and medium-sized companies. Changing room type differentials based on demand seasons, we’ve been able to gain flexibility and respond to trends much faster. The flexibility to adjust the algorithm from one property to the next allowed complete customization without the loss of automation. In one property, in particular, we focus on selling out versus driving rate, resulting in dramatic revenue increases via occupancy lift.”