New Tools Launched to Optimize Hotel Revenue Opportunities

SAN FRANCISCO—As hotels across the world are dealing with the economic struggles caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, they are looking for ways to help them navigate the situation.

Duetto has three new functions to its Revenue Strategy Platform that are designed to do that.

“Given the current reality, we realize that revenue managers are having to do more with less and need to be able to focus, look across clusters of hotels and compare days within much shorter time frames—and that is exactly what we are enabling them to do,” said Cheryl Chavez, chief product officer, Duetto. “This release was an especially important one as the hotel industry is facing its biggest ever challenges right now. We spoke with many clients and hoteliers to hear what their pain points were, and then looked at how we could help them be more efficient, work smarter and have a more agile approach to the changing market.”

The updates include:

AutoPilot Schedule
This new functionality in Duetto GameChanger allows revenue managers to choose which segments are on AutoPilot and when. Users can now automate chosen segments based on:

  • Date Range
  • Days Before Arrival
  • Days of the Week
  • Committed Occupancy
  • Demand Occupancy
  • Any combination of the five

“Autopilot Schedule is an enhancement to our existing Autopilot capabilities that gives revenue managers much more control over which segments are on Autopilot and when so that Duetto can handle tactical decisions in the background while revenue managers can spend more time on higher level, strategic decisions,” said Chavez. “Autopilot scheduling allows the hotelier to schedule Duetto to push rates during days/times that they are not physically available to do so themselves (weekends, personal time off, special cases, etc.)”

Autopilot allows the hotelier to be more strategic. “For example, Autopilot Schedules can be set to publish rates for days where the committed occupancy or the demand occupancy is below a certain threshold,” she said. “When that occupancy increases above your set threshold, Autopilot can automatically shut off for those days and the revenue manager can step in to make more strategic level decisions.”

Restriction Rules
This first of its kind feature in the RMS industry is now the fastest way to create, manage and deploy restrictions across properties, room types, and segments, according to Chavez. “Now, a Restriction Rule takes only a few minutes to set-up or change and can be deployed at scale manually or fully automated for maximum efficiency via AutoPilot.

“Restriction Rules is an enhancement to the existing Availability Restrictions feature in Duetto,” she continued. “Restriction Rules enable revenue teams control and automation over their availability restrictions business logic. Revenue Teams can create rules based on conditions like Demand Occupancy, Committed Occupancy, Days Before Arrival, Dates Ranges and more that will trigger Duetto to recommend restrictions be applied or lifted.”

Revenue Teams can review the Restriction recommendations on the Restrictions page in GameChanger before publishing them to their connected systems. “Restriction Rules eliminate the manual task of adding and removing restrictions on a daily or weekly basis,” said Chavez. “Revenue teams can feel confident that they are never at risk of capturing a less profitable booking during a high-impact period (forgetting to set a restriction) or denying bookings during a need period (forgetting to lift a restriction).”

Notification Center
The new Notification Center enables customers to define which metrics are most important to track, set the benchmark or trigger for the alert, and determine who should be notified. “The ability to define the benchmark period of time is critical now as we work through times when same time last year (STLY) is no longer relevant,” she said. “Duetto customers can now customize the reference period, for example, to look at the last seven days, and receive notifications as soon as current booking levels fall behind the benchmark period.”

She pointed out that key use cases for the Notification Center that help hoteliers optimize revenue include:

  • Be notified of unusual bookings or pickup, so that there are no missed revenue opportunities
  • Be notified of operational issues, such as an unsuccessful rate push, which could impact revenue.  Get ahead of the problem before it’s too late
  • Understand the hotel’s recovery through COVID. With customizable, short term time frames, Revenue Managers can now stay on top of things as we recover and base their Pickup and Booking Notifications on much shorter time frames rather than STLY.
  • Receive multi-property notifications in a single place, to be more efficient.