Introducing Duetto

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Duetto is a cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides revenue management solutions for over 4,000 hotel and casino resort properties around the world. Combining their experience in hospitality with technology, Duetto's platform enables hotels to manage room rates in real-time, based on factors such as demand, occupancy rates, and competitive pricing – helping hotels to maximize their revenue and profitability by setting the most optimal prices for their rooms.

Combining their experience in hospitality with technology, they offer innovative solutions to help hotels optimize profits and drive efficiencies. Duetto helps hotels leverage real-time, dynamic data sources, and then find actionable insights in the data for their go-to-market pricing strategies.

Combining data to take dynamic decision-making to the next level

Known for having the most dynamic pricing in the revenue management industry today, Duetto uses an Open Pricing philosophy that moves away from static bar rates – allowing users to price every segment, channel, and room type independently and truly maximize opportunities. They do this by leveraging the power of data. 

Duetto is creating an ecosystem of the strongest data in the market to power informed decisions and create maximum value for their customers. They take into account a wide variety of factors that support making profitable, data-driven business decisions that go beyond just room profitability, including effective distribution channels, group business and ultimately using data to take the RMS to the next level. 

Duetto’s primary data details the actual bookings made at hotel properties, which they combine with multiple competitive rate sources and group booking sources, and PredictHQ’s intelligent event data. They also use web shopping data, which they gather by tracking how people are interacting with direct bookings on hotel websites. They monitor their booking engines and capture how many people are shopping on their website, how many people are booking rooms, and when people don’t see any availability at all. This data helps Duetto’s clients see when and where demand is high or they are losing business, and identify elements of their strategy to improve. 

The combination of market signals and various data points gives Duetto users a highly accurate picture of expected demand allowing them to optimize pricing and distribution more effectively to maximize yield. The unique data set that we’ll dig into today is Duetto’s current use of and future plans for integrating third-party intelligent event data.

Why Duetto looked into using event data in the first place 

Duetto knew events impacted demand, but it was impossible to track events for each of their clients at scale, and understanding how local events impacted hotels was an obscure process. Each hotel property was responsible for managing their own event calendar and the teams and individuals at these properties were using some level of intuition and legacy knowledge. When you find a property where the demand forecast is off, the reason can be due to many factors such as events changing dates or getting canceled – but often, it is because the hotel didn’t update the impact to reflect demand from that event in the past, nor did they plan for it for the following year. It’s a big deal for hotel forecasts, and it’s really obvious when it’s not working correctly. 

A part of what inspired the conception of Duetto was in 2011 when the unexpected became a wake-up call regarding the need for real-time data. The Electric Daisy Carnival, or EDC, is the world’s largest dance music festival which used to take place in Los Angeles – but organizers shocked fans and local businesses alike by moving locations nearly 300 miles away to Las Vegas without much notice.

“For hotels in Las Vegas, the last-minute move of the major music festival EDC, from Los Angeles in 2011, caused complete and total chaos. This moment is just one of many examples of the necessity to have dynamic data for events and the missed opportunity for those that lack that data.”

Ravi Chandrasekaran

Head of Analytics, 

Duetto

Since the move from LA in 2011, the multi-day music festival has generated billions for the Las Vegas economy. For Duetto, it’s all about identifying the missed opportunities in the past to understand how they plan to use the data in the future. 

They discovered PredictHQ and quickly realized it was the only data source that covers every major event category, including everything from conferences to concerts to unscheduled events such as extreme weather and airport delays. Not only does this represent millions of events tracked globally but these events are verified, enriched, and include intelligence such as predicted end times and predicted event spend. 

How Duetto uses event data to unlock dynamic, data-driven business decisions

To start, Duetto is testing the impact of the data to better understand the demand impact for hotel locations. Their data science team is correlating the data back to what the historical demand patterns were for individual hotels. So when they see a spike in a certain hotel’s demand, they are connecting the dots to see if they can trace that back to an event. They need to understand the different event types that impact their different properties and ensure they have the correct data points to understand how much events impact their users. 

Incorporating PredictHQ data is bringing the dynamic nature of Duetto’s system to the next level by unlocking demand-based pricing optimization. Intelligent event data plays a major role in forward-looking indicators for peak periods of demand. Insight into demand-driving factors such as concerts, expos, sports games, spring breaks, and other events in their markets helps them refresh and optimize room rates at the right time.

“Not only are we pricing at the most dynamic and granular levels, but with PredictHQ, we’re now doing so when the market gives us cues – ensuring that we're refreshing our rates at the perfect time.”

Ravi Chandrasekaran

Head of Analytics, 

Duetto

Today, the Duetto team is utilizing PredictHQ’s web UI to find the impactful events within close proximity to individual hotel properties but they are quickly making moves to use Amazon Data Exchange to ingest PredictHQ data directly into GameChanger – their platform that makes tactical decisions around pricing for hoteliers. Depending on the event, the platform will suggest business actions to take in preparation for the change in demand. 

PredictHQ’s event data also pulls into their CommandCenter dashboard alert product, which provides powerful data visualizations such as charts and widgets to highlight places where hotel clients should pay attention to and the recommended steps to take based on the information given around upcoming events. 

Reliable predictive signals without the hassle

While integrating various data sources and market signals, what becomes challenging is ensuring high-quality signals. For example, web shopping is where you’re analyzing how many people are booking rooms for a certain hotel. If the hotel runs its own promotion for discounted rates, the web shopping data suddenly changes – making it difficult to interpret and requiring further investigation and leg work. 

“PredictHQ gives us a high-quality source that we don't have to inspect and process before we can use it. With features such as rankings, we know the data is vetted, and we can trust when an event is predicted to have a major impact. We don't have to think a lot about how to process or interpret the PredictHQ event data and we can confidently use the data that we know has been verified and is accurate.”

Ravi Chandrasekaran

Head of Analytics, 

Duetto

How event data boosts profitability for Duetto users

More accurately predicting what's going to happen in the future can't be determined just by looking at hotel bookings – it requires some external market signal to see. Having forward visibility into market-level demand impact gives hotels a massive competitive edge. From a hotel's perspective, advanced notice of events such as the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in San Francisco represents a critical opportunity to boost revenue and improve the guest experience. Event visibility is an essential ingredient for hotels to use for their pricing strategies and their ability to maximize revenue. Because of this differentiated offering and value-add that PredictHQ will bring to Duetto's platform, they expect to see benefits in key metrics like customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, and NPS.

The hotel industry has gone through a period of tremendous change and is still readapting its models in forecasting and operations. With events back in full force and room-night demand projected to surpass pre-pandemic levels in 2023, it's never been more important for hoteliers to uncover and quickly act and adapt to events driving surges in demand, to ensure they can spot opportunities, attract more guests, and maximize revenue. For many, revenue management is still a manual task – which is why Duetto works to reduce this burden and provide their clients with suggestions on these events. This way, they're not caught unprepared for the events that matter most in their respective markets. 

And this is just the beginning of their journey with event data. Within 12 months, Duetto plans to embed event data directly into their forecasting models, meaning the data will be included in automated pricing tools.