Travis Weber is the Vice President of Sales for the Americas at Duetto, a leading revenue management platform that helps hotels maximize profitability through dynamic pricing and data-driven insights. Duetto has been recognized as the #1 Revenue Management System in the HotelTechAwards for four consecutive years, reflecting its strong reputation in hotel technology. Travis brings a unique perspective to hospitality technology, having started his career in marketing for the San Antonio Spurs, transitioned to ski resort sales in his hometown of Taos, New Mexico, and worked on the distribution side at Expedia.
Where should a hotel start with revenue technology? According to Travis Weber, VP of Sales for the Americas at Duetto, you start by naming the pain you want to solve, not by shopping for a tool. Identify the friction (aging systems, reactive pricing, missed revenue), then work backward to the fix. It is fine to start simple with a PMS or RMS and build from there. Kin Sio sits down with Travis on The Lights On Podcast to talk about the intersection of hotel technology and profitability.
Travis has seen the commercial side from several angles: selling ski trips in his hometown of Taos, marketing for the San Antonio Spurs, and working the OTA side at Expedia before joining Duetto, the revenue management platform ranked number one in the HotelTechAwards four years running. His take on OTAs cuts against the usual frustration. Treat them as a marketing arm, not the enemy. They spend heavily to understand buyer behavior and remove friction, and back when OTAs started, many hotels raised rates roughly 20% to cover the commission, so the whole industry got a bump. If a booking is truly incremental, the commission is closer to a customer acquisition cost than lost revenue. Kin frames it with the iPhone: Apple sells direct, but you still find iPhones at Target, Best Buy, and Costco, because more storefronts mean more reach.
On the systems themselves, Travis is direct that the biggest barrier is mindset, not budget. The smallest hotel on Duetto is six rooms, and vacation rentals use it too, so size is not the wall people assume. Above 100 rooms without an RMS, you are likely leaving money on the table: that is 100 rooms across multiple channels across 365-plus days a year, and a human revenue manager will miss something. He reframes the cost too, noting a 12-cent ADR change can offset the price of the tool. The bigger story is Duetto's acquisition of HotStats about a year ago, which pushes the focus from top-line RevPAR toward bottom-line profitability, the total-profit-per-guest thinking Duetto carried over from its start as a Las Vegas casino tool. AI, Travis argues, will not replace revenue managers. Its real job is breaking down the data silos that have kept hotel systems from talking to each other.
This episode is sponsored by Lights On.
Lights On helps hotels grow revenue more consistently by managing pricing, distribution, and digital marketing together.
We help hotels identify new revenue opportunities, so they don’t leave money on the table. We also manage the full revenue and marketing operation, enabling the on-the-ground team to focus on the guest experience.
If your hotel needs stronger revenue growth, visit lightson.co to learn more.
Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company
[00:00]
Kin Sio: Welcome back to the Lights On Podcast. I'm Kin Sio, CEO of Lights On and your host today. On this podcast, we share stories across hospitality about building and growing hotel businesses.
This episode is sponsored by Lights On. Lights On helps hotels grow revenue more consistently by managing pricing, distribution, and digital marketing together. We help hotels identify new revenue opportunities so they don't leave money on the table. We also run the full revenue and marketing operation so the team on the ground can stay focused on the best guest experience. If your hotel needs more revenue growth, visit lightson.co to learn more.
Our guest today, Travis Weber, VP of Sales for the Americas at Duetto — the revenue management platform ranked number one in hotel technology four years in a row. Travis took an unusual path to hotel technology, starting from marketing for the San Antonio Spurs to running sales at a ski resort in his hometown of Taos, New Mexico, to working the OTA side at Expedia. Today at Duetto, he's helping hotels rethink not just the top-line revenue, but also total profitability. Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Weber: Thank you, Kin. It's a pleasure to be here.
Kin Sio: Well, let's get started with your career because obviously you took an unusual path to hospitality. Tell me about how you started at your hometown of Taos in New Mexico. You were selling ski trips back there growing up. What is that like working at a destination market? What did it teach you about all of these revenue management technologies?
Travis Weber: It was a really interesting journey coming back to Taos after starting my professional career post-university and really coming back into the ski side of things. I grew up there — mountains and skiing and destination resorts are something that's very near and dear to my heart. I didn't think I would be in sales coming out of college. It wasn't exactly what my focus was. I was a broadcast major actually, so I was focused on trying to go into sports. That's the short stint with the Spurs organization.
But it led me back to Taos because I stayed in touch with the owners there. I worked there in high school — rental shop, resort-type jobs. In staying in touch with the ownership, they knew that I was in sales. They were getting ready to revamp some sales processes and really the entire team, and they brought me in to start that from the ground up.
It was unique. At the time, Taos didn't own any lodging. So we were truly just selling a resort and selling a destination experience and working really agnostically and organically with our local lodging partners to figure out the right vacation packages, the right messages to get people there.
It was cool for me because I think anybody in sales would tell you, anybody in hospitality would tell you, it's important to be passionate about what you do. There's nothing greater than being passionate about promoting and selling your hometown and a destination where you grew up and seeing people come there, experience it, and tell you time and time again what a fantastic experience they had. It was unique. It was cool to be able to put that back on the map.
A lot of people don't associate mountains and skiing with the state of New Mexico. A lot of people think deserts, maybe Breaking Bad. Those are the associations folks tend to have. So to go across the country and represent that, explain to folks the culture that was there and the ability to have some fun in the unique mountains of northern New Mexico — it was a cool way to launch my career.
Kin Sio: That experience, to your point, was adjacent to lodging. I'm still curious about how revenue decisions are made there. Is there anything about revenue management thinking — pricing and sales on destination and ski — that you still think about to this day that impacts what you're doing at Duetto?
[05:00]
Travis Weber: Absolutely. We always get attracted to the heads-in-beds mentality — getting people to our resorts. Obviously we want to focus on the experience, the positive reviews, the positive guest sentiment. But what gets lost a lot of the time, especially when people are running resorts, is where the costs come in.
To run and operate a ski resort is definitely not a cheap business model by any stretch of the imagination. But you can imagine that season passes, lift tickets, group ski lessons, rentals — where you're using the same equipment or minimal staffing over and over — is a much lower cost, much higher profit model than running a hotel where it's perishable inventory. You have to stock and supply things and you're really trying to manage your bottom line with your top-line growth. It's still there. You just have maybe some higher-margin components on the ski side.
We even saw this in Taos when we started to dive into the lodging side of things. One of my early ventures there was to actually start a central reservations company with the resort that said, "Hey, let's get our lodging partners together to help subsidize things to create these packages." It was amazing how quickly we could see what impact the resort could have on the bottom-line financials and funds that you could put towards a project like that, versus the lodges that were capped by all of their occupied-room constraints and their cost constraints. And even for some of the condos, there are owner's constraints. So it was really eye-opening to see the difference in the two business models and how they play together.
Kin Sio: Definitely overlaps too, right? In talking to lots of different hotels, especially the more upscale properties versus the more budget ones, the constant debate is about selling commodities versus selling experiences. Obviously for the more luxurious, high-upscale properties, they have a bit more budget to play with the experience side to really increase the rate.
Not necessarily saying that a more budget hotel property can't — creatively, sometimes it could be affordable when you're thinking about branding, telling the right story. With that mindset, you can find ways to present a better experience even for much smaller budget properties. It's not necessarily just because you're a budget hotel that you start getting lazy and not thinking about that. For someone who does that, they are definitely at the mercy of the market — more of a commoditized situation than selling for the experience.
Travis Weber: Absolutely. It's the old revenue management adage, right? The right guest, the right channel, the right price, the right time. It takes on a different look for every property. You see it even across destination markets — for every hotel, you have to figure out where you fit in that guest cycle.
Are you just a place where somebody is stopping through on travel? Are you something that is maybe the more budget-friendly side of the travel experience, and you just want people to have a great adventure so that when they look back, they associate your hotel with it? Or are you in the lifestyle and luxury side of things where you're actually playing into those experiences and profiting from them as well?
Kin Sio: Since you pointed out your career — when you went to school, what you really wanted was to get into professional sports. Your short stint at the San Antonio Spurs — by the way, I'm a big fan — how did that experience play out? What did you do there? Did you get anything from the professional sports, big entertainment space, also adjacent to hospitality? What did you learn from there about selling and about hospitality? Any transferable experience?
[10:00]
Travis Weber: It's interesting — the volume play and that you're always in a space where you have something that people want to a degree. The interesting piece for me with the Spurs organization was I was actually living in Austin at the time. I was selling sponsorship packages for the Spurs' minor league team that was based in Austin. Then we were doing in-market season ticket sales for the Spurs season ticket holders, as well as marketing up in Austin to drive people down to San Antonio.
It was really cool because even the people in Austin — it's still a few-hour drive. You're still making an experience out of the trip anytime you want to go there. So you learned a lot about how people plan, how intentional they are with things.
But I think one of the biggest things that I learned that became replicable across any sales process is the hustle. At the time I was there, in 2008, right around recession time, we also didn't have the technology that we have today. You would literally have somebody walk into your office at a major organization and say, "Hey, I just sent you an email," or, "Here's a printout of a thousand leads. We want to get through these businesses in the next month. Let's see if we can get them a Spurs package" — or at the time it was the Austin Toros, the minor league team.
You're sitting there doing the old sales adage of dial for dollars. It wasn't any sort of value proposition. It wasn't an experience. It was who can pick up the phone. And when they do, the first thing I can ask them is, "Are you a Spurs fan?" It was super easy. Now there's so many other ways people can find you. The Spurs are a great example — they have a waiting list for season ticket holders. My job in that market became obsolete because they just sell themselves at this point.
There was a lot of learning from that early-career hustle and grind. The other big thing I learned from working in sports and then the ski industry — I've seen it applied across destination resorts and lodging — when you're in these beautiful places or amazing venues that people want to hang out in, there's a lot of competition for your job. The folks at the top a lot of times will say, "We can bring somebody else in that's just as excited to do it without having to promote or progress these people." It was an interesting learning that if you don't stay sharp, you're going to get left in the dust pretty quick. Just like anything in life.
Kin Sio: Is there one sales tactic from that experience that you still find super useful with what you do nowadays?
Travis Weber: Just the statistics of sales. I've always found that interesting. There's an art and a science to sales for sure — trying to go out and target the right people, the marketing and revenue aspect of it. But one of the things that often gets overlooked is the science behind sales.
They used to give us a thousand leads. Most of the people that weren't successful would just pick up that list of a thousand leads and start going. There was no strategy to it. I would look at that and say, if there's a thousand here, can I get a hundred answers? Ten meetings to get one qualified client? Is that what I'm going for here? If you're doing that math, you're able to understand who the right high-value ones are to help me get where I need to go. Similar to hotels building their budget — what channel is going to be the most profitable? How are we going to go tackle that?
Kin Sio: All about the demand generation split into top of funnel. Everything's a funnel, right? When you cast the net, it's not just cast the net and leave it alone. If you think about all the guests as the leads for the hotel — getting these potential guests working down through the funnel to eventually hitting the booking button — there are multiple steps to it. Somebody being strategic about it, there are ways to really maximize the impact, thinking about how do we efficiently spend marketing dollars.
[15:00]
Travis Weber: It's always been interesting to just know your audience. In SaaS sales, we talk a lot about our ideal customer profile, or ICP. That goes back through every industry. Everybody knows who the right person for them to target is, whether you know it when you walk in the door, or you look at a list and say, "This is the type of person I want to be going after." Every hospitality company, every hotel has pegged what they want to target for the right audience mix.
Kin Sio: Well, since you mentioned channel and audience, let's fast-forward a little bit to your time at Expedia. It's kind of a frenemy in terms for many hoteliers. Working on that side of the table, what did you see from a distribution perspective? OTAs are essentially the big distribution network for hoteliers. How did that experience shift your thinking about revenue management for hotels?
Travis Weber: It was wild. When I started with Expedia was when they did this big hiring push, trying to grow their supply in the US. I was shocked when you walk into some of these places and they weren't on Expedia. This is 2014. You're looking at people in national park markets who are sold out all summer, using books for their reservations, still writing things down on paper, and you're trying to talk to them about becoming a partner with an OTA. They're like, "Why would I be on that internet thing?"
It's this interesting way of getting people involved. But the more we saw it evolve and the more money people started to put into it, you realize that the OTAs had this really great advantage of being your marketing arm. They're spending money on understanding what customers do, catering their website to make sure it's driving for conversion and removing friction. And at the end of the day, sure, there's a commission that you're paying.
But when you look back, where would hotel rates be if OTAs didn't exist? I think a lot of people from back when OTAs started would tell you, "Yeah, we just started playing with them and started increasing our rates by 20% to cover the commission." So everybody in the industry just got a 20% bump because these guys were charging a commission. It was interesting to hear everybody's perspectives. There was always talk of what if you just ran a hotel 100% OTA — that was your business strategy, you had it baked in. I think there's a lot of value there.
It's been interesting to see the evolution of that channel over time. Expedia was kind of a singular lane. Then they've got the package path that helped branch out. Then you bring in the mixed booking path of Expedia Collect and Hotel Collect. Then you start bringing in ancillaries and all the other areas they can collect through. Vrbo now — it's been wild to see the growth of what was thought at one point as an OTA singular channel now has seven different varietals within it.
Kin Sio: Obviously in our world, it's always the frenemy relationship between OTAs and hoteliers. So many false perceptions. If we have to pick one thing that hotels are consistently wrong about in the OTA relationship, what would that be from your experience?
Travis Weber: Oh gosh, it's such a good question, and I think it varies hotel to hotel and market to market. But I think the biggest one is that they're just there to steal your piece of the pie. If you're not doing things the right way, if you're not putting your right strategies and your right price out there across a different, vast distribution network of channels, then yeah, you might be setting yourself up to have the same guest book on an OTA that might have booked on your direct channel. But that's just not the way it works.
Now you look at where we've gone with AI — it's completely evolving again. To say that people go straight to an OTA is not necessarily true either. I had this great example of an old friend who ran a hotel in New Mexico and was very unsavvy in the world of OTAs. Not a big fan of them. He signed up for one of those Expedia promotions. He was not happy about it — it's going to cost 20%, plus this margin on this discount during their winter season.
[20:00]
They had a bad start to their winter. They were in the mountains of northern New Mexico. And all those guests that he got wound up staying true — the majority of them. Whatever his policies were in place, he locked in some good business, business that he wouldn't have had without that promotion. I remember talking to him months after that and he was like, "You know what, that worked out pretty well. We might do that again next year." It was just this whole misconception of "I'm just buying down my business." And that was not the case.
Kin Sio: One analogy I always use for our hotel clients is the iPhone. One of the greatest products in the world — they run their direct Apple stores, they could be selling all their iPhones there all day long. But truth be told, from time to time, you see iPhones being sold at different carrier networks — Target, Best Buy, Costco. There's a reason that having different people selling your products — in this case, the experience, the inventory, the room nights of hotels — if we think about everything strategically, there's ways to expand your reach, getting more people to learn about your hotel and getting incremental people who book that you wouldn't otherwise get if you were only having people book through your website.
The big challenge is how can we make sure that when you're running the complexity of multiple storefront distribution networks, how do we make sure that people who book direct still go through direct, and you are truly getting those incremental bookings through OTAs? If those are truly incremental, then why would you care about someone charging you 10, 20, 25%, because you wouldn't get those bookings otherwise if you're not showing up at the right place.
Travis Weber: I think it's interesting to look back at it from the outside in now and see the different things that people miss. You're talking about major companies that spend a lot of time understanding consumer behavior, the buying cycle and patterns. If you're not doing a ton of business with them, okay, fine, but you should be paying attention to what they're doing because they're spending time on that research.
If they're telling you that content is king, maybe you really need to be focusing on the content on your website. Maybe that's super important nowadays. If they're telling you that loyalty is king — Expedia going to their One Key program — okay, maybe it's time for me to not look at my loyalty program for an independent hotel if that's what we're talking about, but how I'm serving my guests to make them loyal. Because it's telling you there's value there. People forget the intangibles these companies are showing you.
Kin Sio: Well, there's time to talk about Duetto now. Coming from Expedia, which is a very different dynamic — now being perceived sometimes as an enemy, to what you guys are operating at Duetto, which is essentially almost like a wingman to hoteliers. I'm sure most people know about Duetto at this point, but for those listeners who don't, do you want to give us a 30-second elevator pitch on what Duetto does?
[25:00]
Travis Weber: Hopefully my team's not watching this to critique my practice. But Duetto — we've been around for about 15 years. We are at this point evolving beyond a revenue management system to a revenue and profit operating system, and we can dive into what that means a little bit more.
Really, we are a technology that connects to the back end of a PMS to provide hotels with dynamic pricing 365 days out of the year. It's to give you that peace of mind. It's to help you make sure that you're optimizing your top-line revenue. And then the profitability part is now looking at that bottom-line revenue. That has a lot to do with our acquisition of HotStats and where we're going as a company.
For Duetto, a big piece of the pie for us is making sure that partnership comes first and people have a system that they can really use and trust and grow and adopt with. That's really big for us. You nailed it — we want to be a sidekick. We're a big believer in the combination of human and machine, helping everybody achieve their goals.
Kin Sio: Well, let's do some myth busting. For people who know about Duetto — because it's one of the top revenue management systems in the industry — sometimes it gets perceived as an expensive solution, only for bigger, corporate properties. But our listeners have lots of smaller, independent boutique hotels running below 100 rooms. First of all, is that true? And if not, how do you think about that gap between the perception versus the reality?
Travis Weber: I think there's definitely some truth to that. We know that smaller hotels are operating on tighter budgets and the profitability on each room type needs to be scrutinized that much more. So it does make it a more expensive tool, especially for really small hotels.
You start getting above 50 rooms, that's fine, but you start getting above 100 rooms — if you're operating without a revenue management system, you're probably leaving money on the table. If you have a 100-room hotel and you don't have a revenue manager on site, who's making those rate changes and how on top of it are they really?
Even one revenue manager overseeing a singular 100-room hotel — that's 100 rooms across multiple channels, across 365-plus days of the year. Someone's going to miss something. It's not to say they're not doing a great job. They're just human. And it's nice to have something else out there playing that catch-safe to make sure that you're not missing opportunities and you're maximizing revenue. When you can do that all the way down to the room-type level, like we do, that's where you really start to stack up the pennies.
We generally provide a pretty healthy ROI or conservative ROI analysis with properties when they're looking at our software. You can show someone the sticker price and they look at it upfront, just like any other SaaS technology, and go, "Gosh, that seems a bit expensive." When you distill it down to — all of a sudden you have to change your ADR by 12 cents a day to offset the cost of the tool, and you're hoping it's going to raise your ADR even just a dollar. You go 12 cents to a dollar — now you've increased yourself 80 cents profit on every dollar. There's value there.
It's just showcasing that. A lot of times we have to think about it differently in terms of where the value is. Each Duetto and other RMSs included usually come with different products for different hotels. Some may just need something simple, just a revenue tool. Some might just need a BI tool. Some might need a full robust revenue management system that comes with group pricing and displacement and tons of other things. That's where the shopping comes into play.
[30:00]
Kin Sio: So talking about that complexity — truly there will be smaller boutique hotels out there, let's say 10, 20 rooms. Realistically, there's just no way for them to fit anything into their budget for revenue management help or technology.
Travis Weber: You can. We see hotels — we have vacation rentals that use Duetto. You're talking individual units there. The smallest hotel that operates on Duetto is like six rooms.
Part of the other piece that's always been interesting to me with a lot of the SaaS and revenue models is — I get it from a finance perspective why it doesn't happen this way — but the product is generally not priced based on ADR. So if you have a 10-room hotel and you are in the luxury space and you have high ADRs, it's a lot easier for you to offset that cost than if you have a 10-room motel.
Kin Sio: So it all sounds like magic. Coming to the reality of implementation — many people, when they come in thinking about getting a revenue management system, they sign the contract, start getting the system, it's not going to change anything overnight. From the moment someone starts getting on board and using Duetto to the point where they're seeing actual results — that incremental revenue — what's the timeline like? What's the gap? What's the common misconception? So it's actually less of dark magic and more something beyond just the use of the tooling itself.
Travis Weber: I think there's a lot to that question. I go back to even my time at Expedia — when we would sign people up, you would expect big company, you turn the hotel on, you go live, you start selling. There's a lot on the user. You had to figure out your connectivity, make sure your rates were pulling through correctly, get your content set up. It's a similar journey when you set up a revenue management system.
There's a connection that needs to happen between the PMS or the CRS and a company like Duetto. Being that we're about 15 years old means that we were born out of the cloud. We're not dealing with on-premise legacy architecture, which is nice. A lot of our integrations are streamlined, they're quicker, it's easier to set up. It still takes time. Most of that time is aligning people's calendars — we need to talk to someone over here, we need to get our person and the hotel person all to align, and everybody's busy.
But once you're in there — and we try to get people access to the system relatively quickly so they can start building out pricing strategies, taking their trainings — we pride ourselves that the system starts to optimize for you really from day one, especially if you're in there using it. It goes back to that human and machine fundamental. If you're going in and you've plugged in your rates and we've got a scope of what the next 365 days look like and you're starting to make changes and the system's looking at where you made a change and why, it's going to take that into consideration and start learning from that.
Similarly, we give people the ability to easily set their own rules or strategies within the system. I always like to say — and I think people laugh when I say this in demos — every revenue management tool to some degree or another is a rules-based system. Some just give you a little more control over those rules. That's really what we like to lean into.
But with that comes the other part of your question. How do you make sure someone feels comfortable? We give people a very user-friendly tool that is super sophisticated and can very quickly become a lot if you start just setting things up and forgetting what's there and not having a strategy behind them.
We have a really robust training team and training procedure in place to make sure that not only are you getting your project manager for implementation and they're holding your hand, but then you're getting passed off to training. In a lot of cases you have access to our customer success team who are past revenue managers and experts in what they're doing.
[35:00]
We also work with a network of preferred consultants that we definitely recommend — "Hey, your local geography or your type of property, these are some of the consultants you should look at." They're going to take it a step further for you because our team is trained on, "Here's this really cool, sophisticated application. Here's how you use it." But we don't know your market. We can't set your strategies for you. That's where the experts come in and help grow that adoptive culture throughout someone's partnership with us.
Kin Sio: It's kind of like when you're buying a Rolls-Royce — not necessarily everybody can drive a Rolls-Royce nicely. It also makes sense to think about having a chauffeur to get the full experience.
You explained a lot of that. If you were to summarize — thinking about the difference between a hotel that gets real value from a system like Duetto in the first 90 days, versus a hotel that has been using it for years but still treats it like a fancy spreadsheet — what is that real difference in terms of human actions?
Travis Weber: It's funny. I see this across the board where people come to you and say, "I love your product. I love the partnership we have. We want to do more because we feel like we're only scratching the surface of it." You mentioned the phone — I'm sure there's so much more I could do with this thing. Probably barely scratching the surface of it. AI seems like a new learning thing every day. We get that with our products.
Especially as systems in the industry continue to evolve and innovate, there's definitely a level of staying on top of it. For us, I think it's how you provide in-app training, notifications — "Here's something new, here's something you should do" — audits of the system. That's where our customer success team can come in, especially for the larger, more complex hotels that might get lost in some of that stuff over time.
Where you have high turnover of people — "Hey, this person set these strategies up. Maybe some are good, but I want to see what works. I'm going to wipe those out and put my own in." We want to give you that ability to test and learn within the system. Make sure that you're finding the sweet spot that drives the revenue for you.
That's where a lot of the partnerships and things we bring into the application from third-party data and the way we fundamentally think about our core algorithms make us unique and a little bit more bespoke. Everybody in the industry for the last three or four years used the automation Tesla analogy — we're trying to plug it in, be on autopilot, get you from point A to B, and the human has a little bit of engagement to put you on the right tracks, but you get there.
The way we think about it now — Teslas are cool, sure, they're doing the whole autonomous vehicle thing. But this is such a weird movie nerd moment — you think about Iron Man and Tony Stark. He's got something that drives him from here to there. He starts with his normal suit, and it's a little clunky because it's complex and he maybe doesn't fully know what he needs to pull in. All of a sudden he develops this AI-type technology — JARVIS — pulling things from different areas to get exactly what he needs.
That's the idea behind what we see in a really sophisticated revenue technology. It's something that's easy. You go in, you look at it, you go, "This makes sense," but now I want this and I need this to get me there. That's going to be different for every hotel at different times. We want to acknowledge that.
Kin Sio: Are there any stories or case studies you can share where deployment did not go the way expected? We talked about the right way and the right mindset for using a system like Duetto versus hotels that come in without the right mindset. Anything you can share about prepping people to think about the right things when engaging technologies like this?
[40:00]
Travis Weber: I think coming to the table with an open mind of how you price and do things is important, but also know how you price and do things, and that you're asking the right questions within your business to make sure that whatever revenue management system you come up with is the right fit.
I've seen a couple of instances — generally smaller properties on the boutique side — where we went through the process, thought we were having really good conversations, really in-depth questions as to what they needed. Sometimes people ask questions that seem so sophisticated that you're like, maybe we should pump the brakes because maybe you're not understanding where you're going to go with this.
But we like the good questions, and when you're doing a live demo, it really helps people understand how they would use the product. I've seen a couple of instances where people get in and realize, "Hey, this requires a little bit of setup." We explained that in the demo. Look, this is as powerful as you're going to make it. You can set some strategies up and then let the system run in a fully automated fashion.
One of the biggest myths — you talked about myth busting — when we tell people Duetto gives you all this control, the immediate assumption is, "So there's no automation." It's completely the opposite. You set the controls up, you give your system the guardrails, but then it just runs. Even if you didn't set anything up and just plugged it in, it would run.
But people come in and don't realize that they need to set this up. That means if I'm a seasonal resort, in six months or three months, I'm going to have to go back and check this or put something else in. "I don't want to do that. I don't want to have a reminder." Then it becomes this whole snowballing question of, "Why am I paying for this?" A lot of times they default back to Excel sheets because they realize they're maybe not sophisticated enough for an RMS yet. Not that they should feel that they have to be, but they should know what they're getting into. There is a user process.
Kin Sio: I think a better way to think about that — not necessarily about sophistication, but about the open-minded mindset to be willing to learn. For someone who is not used to a revenue management technology, a lot of times you're running pricing with a spreadsheet. That is a transition and a willingness to change. I think it's a big theme, especially now that we're going to talk about some of the AI stuff as well.
The paradigm is shifting. The way of doing things, even revenue management — it sounds like a very narrow discipline, but the change in technology could fundamentally change how you approach your pricing strategy. Just keeping the open mind to learn and understand and be willing to try things a little bit differently. Having that usually sits at the heart of success.
Travis Weber: We've seen a lot of it. You talk about my career and where I've come from — there's been a lot of different evolutions. But one of the biggest moments for me was making this move from Expedia to Duetto where I went from talking singular channel costs and what some perceive as a discount channel cost, to holistic revenue strategies and holistic profitability. You move into this different lane and you think that it's an easier conversation.
[45:00]
I know there are hotels in Hawaii that deal with this. I know there are hotels in destination markets in the mountains and on the mainland. National parks are very prevalent for this. When you're in a high-destination, high-volume area, you get very comfortable just knowing those people are coming, and you forget to focus on what's going to optimize for the future. Those renovations are going to come up. Maybe you want to expand. Maybe there's an opportunity to do something. Or maybe you're just comfortable doing it and there's a way to save yourself time.
A lot of times people forget to do that. This industry becomes very slow and resistant to change. It's not always a bad thing — we want to protect the guest experience. I totally get that. But I think there are ways that we work with people. This comes up so often in that change management and adoption cycle. We don't want to just plug something in where you forget it's there. We want something that becomes a part of your team and grows with you and helps you understand that revenue management isn't a big scary thing. It's something that can enable me.
We saw that a lot with COVID. Some of the first people that were let go from a lot of properties were the revenue managers. The owners and GMs were like, "Yeah, they don't really know what they do." Keep the salespeople, send the revenue managers out. Then you get a few months into the pandemic and they start thinking, "Well, we need to bring some people back." The revenue managers were the first ones they brought back. "We need to make sure this is priced right." I think there's been a lot of value placed on revenue management and commercial strategy in our industry in a really positive way since then.
Kin Sio: You mentioned — particularly for the smaller independent boutique owners, because they didn't have the luxury to learn about all these concepts and principles — when these kinds of property owners come up to you now asking for advice and feedback, thinking, "Okay, I have to start approaching the use of revenue management technology" — or honestly, just any hospitality technology in general — what would you recommend them doing and thinking and asking as a first step of exploration?
Travis Weber: I think they need to step back and ask themselves what the pain is that they want to solve for, or the ultimate goal. Is there a pain they're feeling at their property that's making them ask this? Is it that they feel they don't have the right connection with their guests anymore? Things have too much friction — the guest of today wants things very frictionless, but still the human in front of them. Maybe their technology is 15, 20 years old and they're sitting in front of a computer instead of having face-to-face interaction. Maybe it's even older and they can't book easily, and there's friction that way.
So I think it's checking on why they're looking at the technology and then really doing their homework as to what it solves for. It's not a bad thing to start simple. Start with the PMS, start with the RMS, see what works for you, and then build out from there.
There's definitely a logic to some of the PMS-type ecosystems today where a few companies are like, "We solve for everything. We have all of it." I think that's great. If somebody can solve all your needs under a singular hat, cool. Give it a go. See how it works. But a lot of times, especially in these small hotels, there's so many little bespoke needs that making sure you have — not necessarily the best-in-class technology in everything, sure, that'd be nice, if everybody had the budget — but at least the one or two pieces that are going to make your life easier. Figure out what those are and then say, "Hey, in five years, where do I see myself with this?" That will help you back into what you justify as either the budget or the line item expense.
Kin Sio: There's a concept that everything is not necessarily binary, it's a spectrum. You're not going to be buying one or two pieces of technology to get you from zero to 100% having all problems solved. Just that incremental improvement — if there are things that are going to solve your pain, one step, two steps, you're going to get a few more percentage points at a time. You're still better than your version yesterday.
So going back to the "dark magic" — not necessarily anything is dark magic. Yes, a tool or technology is going to be very useful if you use it the right way. And also there's the operational aspect somebody has to think about — not just, "Oh, I bought something," and then forget it, but actually thinking about what it means. Maybe the team has to change the way they work. Now with the technology it's going to be easier work, but not necessarily no work at all.
My last question for you — with all these changes and the AI conversation — two-part question. One, what are you really excited about with what AI can do with technology and hospitality? And the flip side, what are people still getting so wrong about what AI could do today?
[49:00]
Travis Weber: They're good questions and things that we're tackling consistently. I think we haven't really touched on it — Duetto's acquisition of HotStats about a year ago is interesting because we purchased a company that focuses on the bottom line in P&L data. We're trying to figure out how to marry that the right way into a revenue management system that is one of the best in class. So how do you make sure you're impacting top line and bottom line?
AI is helping expedite a lot of that exploration. I think that's a really big part and something that's really exciting. To me, it is just a microcosm of an example of how AI is going to help this industry. One of the reasons hotels have been slow to adopt technology — one, we're very protective of the guest. You want somebody to come back to your property, you want to make sure you keep them, and because of that, you're protective of your data.
But because people have been so protective of that data, and now it's everywhere, AI makes it a little bit more accessible for everyone. Unfortunately, that's not always going to be the game we can play in. And the way people book using AI now is going to be very different too. But the systems are all very disparate and they don't talk to each other. Because of that, it's made integrations across softwares — I'm not just talking RMS to PMS, I'm talking anything I've done in the hospitality industry — there's always been integration friction, getting data from point A to point B because people look at it differently, or because it takes forever to build the bridge.
That's what I think AI is going to expedite. It's going to break down those silos and allow the industry to move a lot more fluid and seamless when it comes to the entire back-of-house to front-of-house experience.
One thing that's unique to the way Duetto looks at revenue — not just the HotStats piece — we started out of Las Vegas as a casino tool. We work with a lot of casino properties because we look at that total profitability per guest. That's something casinos do and it's how they do revenue management. But it's the philosophy that's shifting to the rest of the world now. How much is that guest worth to me? How much does it cost to clean that room — that's a very basic thing. But how much does the labor cost? How am I factoring all this into what I'm charging for my room?
Those are the things that AI is helping factor into the back-end algorithms that ultimately are going to drive more sophistication, better pricing, better communication amongst the teams, and hopefully just a better guest experience. I think that's what everybody in hospitality is here for. But also better partner relationships.
Kin Sio: The HotStats acquisition in general is worth another session talking about, because it's not just a tool but also thinking about the shift. In the revenue management field for the past decade or two, everybody's so focused on top-line performance. But what most hotel owners actually care about is the bottom line — that's the money going back to their pocket. There are so many complexities, layers of technologies, and silos that keep revenue management professionals, and honestly anyone working in hotels, from understanding how things differ from the top line all the way to the bottom line.
Technology is definitely the difference right now. It's almost ready to start breaking through the silos and getting people to focus on what a hotel owner actually cares about, which is the bottom line. We definitely have to bring you back to talk about that in particular. Because this is not just a technology — I think it's a mindset shift, now that the technology is getting to a point to be able to help and make it so much easier that you don't need a NASA engineer to make it possible.
Travis Weber: We've even seen it in the industry. Everybody for years — and we still do it, and it's not a bad thing — the big focus is ADR, occupancy, and ultimately RevPAR. Where do you sit on your STR benchmarks and your different indexes? Those aren't bad things, but those are only a fraction of the picture.
Now I start presenting on some of this HotStats data, and I'm having to learn a whole new set of metrics that go even beyond TRevPAR and GOPPAR and some of the things we've heard, that break down every single bit of a hotel's P&L. It's wild. I think we're just starting to scratch the surface and we're going to get to some really cool places that ultimately are going to lead to better technology, but then for you as the consumer and someone traveling, you're going to see that clear definition of, "I'm paying this and this is how it's making me feel, and this is what I'm getting for it." That's going to have that direct correlation that will hopefully spur more direct bookings.
Kin Sio: Cool. You definitely have to come back for that. I can see we could go on for two hours. Travis, where can people find and learn more about you?
Travis Weber: I'm on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's an easy one. Travis Weber. Instagram, I don't post much on, so you don't need to find me there anymore. If you do, you're just going to see a bunch of small children and maybe some old videos of me doing silly things on skis.
LinkedIn's a pretty easy one. If people have questions, you can always email me — travis.weber@duettoresearch.com. I'm always happy to help. I think that's one of the biggest things with this industry — whether we're competitors or not, everybody's always trying to help each other to better what we're doing. It's the nature of the hospitality industry. And it's why we all love it.
Kin Sio: Thanks, Travis. We've been talking to Travis Weber, VP of Sales for the Americas at Duetto. Thanks, Travis, for joining.
Travis Weber: Thank you, Kin.
Kin Sio: All right. Signing out.
Transform your group booking strategies with Lights On and watch your occupancy soar.
.svg)
