Last month, GrowthCurve Capital acquired Duetto, a leading provider of revenue management software for the hospitality industry, from affiliates of Warburg Pincus and other shareholders. Partnering with the private equity firm enables Duetto to further accelerate its AI product development, support the launch of new business lines, and expand into new markets. “GrowthCurve focuses on data-rich companies and leveraging artificial intelligence to unlock new products and enhance existing products, and that’s very much in line with what we are,” said Duetto CEO David Woolenberg in an exclusive interview with LODGING. “They have a deep understanding of what we do and the hospitality landscape, and they have a lot of great ideas in addition to the ideas that we’re already working on. So, I think it’s going to be a great partnership.”
Woolenberg noted that Duetto expects to roll out new AI products in the second half of this year, but the focus is not just on more powerful pricing and forecasting. “It’s also about making [the tools] more user friendly,” he said. “What we’ve really tried to do at the outset of the company is to create software that allows our customers to focus on the strategy and let the software do things that frankly take up a lot of time, like building reports. … And so, we want to continue to build on that foundation, and AI is a natural enabler of that.”
Duetto’s formula of user-friendly, leading-edge technology has seen widespread success in the hospitality market, with more than 6,000 hotel and casino resort properties in more than 60 countries using its applications, which include GameChanger for pricing, ScoreBoard for intelligent reporting, and BlockBuster for contracted-business optimization.
Introducing OpenSpace
At HITEC 2024, Duetto announced the launch of its latest product, OpenSpace, a revenue management solution and booking engine for meeting and event spaces. “The feedback [on OpenSpace] has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Woolenberg. “There really is a lack of sophisticated software in this area. … It’s been an underserved part of the market. So, we’re really excited about OpenSpace. The conversations not only with our existing customers but also with potential customers, have been positive. We expect this to be a great growth area for us in the coming years.”
LODGING spoke with Duetto’s global director of marketing, Katrina Wheeler, and director of product, Gerhard Wasem, about OpenSpace, which outputs a highly informed rate recommendation for a given meeting or event based on sophisticated demand predictions and numerous other parameters. “There is a final price in the end for every single RFP that the sales agent can just enter into the system,” Wasem explained. One of OpenSpace’s differentiators is its dynamic pricing of meeting rooms and ancillaries, he added. “We run our analysis on a daily basis. So, we do demand predictions and rate recommendations for every single day,” Wasem said. “And on top of that we can build strategies that take everything from the particular event into consideration. We look at the number of event days and number of participants in combination with the space size. So, we really look into every single RFP deeply, but at the same time in a very efficient way.” Transient business displacement is also factored in. “We see if the group has low, medium, or high displacement—the algorithm takes all of that into consideration,” he said. With a state-of-the-art new product in the group sales space and a partnership that will further enhance its AI software offerings, Duetto is well positioned to stay on the cusp of revenue management technology in 2024 and beyond.
