Two former Wynn executives and a San Francisco technology industry leader are using big data to try to change the way hotels set their room rates.
Their company, Duetto, uses algorithms to monitor market behavior and recommend how much money a hotel should charge for its rooms. Duetto’s goal is to give hotels a more nuanced understanding of potential customers so they can fluctuate rates accordingly.
Duetto looks at data including flight times and weather patterns along with information pulled from the hotel’s website — like what happens when someone explores the cost of a room but doesn’t book anything.
“We’re basically giving insight into analytics that the hotels have never looked at before,” said co-founder Marco Benvenuti, one of the Wynn veterans who is now Duetto’s chief analytics and product officer.
Benvenuti said that when hotels usually adjust their rates they do so across the board, for all of their room types. Duetto could tell them just how much to raise or lower the price of one type of room in order to appeal to a specific customer group.
On the gaming side, Duetto is able to predict how much money a segment of customers is likely to spend — on gambling and other activities — and then recommend who should receive complimentary offers.
Utilizing strategies like this reportedly worked out well for El Cortez. After the historic downtown hotel and casino starting using one of Duetto’s cloud-based products, its average daily rate increased by 10 percent year over year, according to a case study provided by Duetto.
And the number of bookings made directly through the El Cortez — as opposed to a third party like Expedia — shot up 109 percent.
Duetto doesn’t have any other Las Vegas clients, but it has worked with hotels in other states. Benvenuti said the company is working on signing three other Las Vegas contracts.
The company is also preparing to move into new offices in Tivoli Village, more than doubling its space in the valley. Duetto operates from offices in San Francisco as well, where former Salesforce executive Craig Weissman works as the company’s chief technology officer.
CEO and co-founder Patrick Bosworth, the other former Wynn employee, said that he and Benvenuti saw the need for Duetto after they began working as consultants.
“We became convinced that in order to do the things that we wanted to do to carry not only the casino resort industry forward but really the broader lodging market, and help them compete for the next decade or two, there needed to be better technology,” Bosworth said.