DUETTO
Change the way you price your resort
Duetto’s GameChanger is aimed squarely at casinos and plans to revolutionise the way you look at your customers. It can aid customer retention and bring value across the resort with just a little investment in perspective…
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Duetto’s co-founder and Chief Analytics and Product Officer Marco Benvenuti
asino International spoke with Duetto’s co-founder and Chief Analytics and Product Officer Marco Benvenuti about GameChanger, the cloud-based software- as-a-service that could change the way
the industry prices its rooms forever – while still bringing good value to your guests.
Casino International: What does Duetto do? Marco Benvenuti: Our company does what we call
revenue strategy, providing software that allows hotels and now casinos to basically more strategically and dynamically price their rooms for customers. The company started by creating a product for
hotels, which is easier to price than casinos because they are less complex. Then in early 2014 we created a product specifically for casinos called GameChanger. This tells a casino hotel how much they can charge for different rooms for different customers, and which customer at which time deserves a comped room versus which customers do not deserve a free room. So it enters into the player side of things by evaluating how much people play as well as if they spend other money in different parts of the resort.
CI: Where did the idea come from? Was it an idea that came from outside that you have tweaked to work within the casino resort industry? MB: I’ve been working in the field of revenue management in the gaming industry for about ten years; I used to work for Caesars and then for Wynn pricing rooms and strategic marketing was part of my job. This models ideas that were formulated throughout my career. In building the software we started with regular hotels because the optimisation is that much easier; then we transitioned to casinos when the product was more mature because casinos are more complex. The idea came from casinos and we crossed it over to hotels, then we came back to the mothership, to casinos when the product was ready.
CI: Do you already have customers for GameChanger? MB: We do have customers - on the hotel side, we
have more because the product has been out there for longer. On the casino side we have one in downtown Las Vegas and Resorts in Atlantic City, Margaritaville Resort Casino in Louisiana; and there are newer properties that we have recently signed. In the past few months, we began work under a multi- year agreement with the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. This iconic property, formerly known as the Las Vegas Hilton, is undergoing a major overhaul, and selected GameChanger to optimize revenues, given its new mix of gaming, convention and time share customers. Earlier this year, we also started working with the South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa, which overlooks the Las Vegas Strip and which features 2,100-rooms.
CI: Does the software work best when implemented with player tracking software, or does it work with historical data? MB: In order to work it needs to connect with the
property management system of any hotel because we need to look at historical data, create a forecast and all of that; but of course, the system works better and is more dynamic, giving better decisions, if you are interfaced with any customer relationship managements system. In the case of a casino, of course, this means the player tracking system. This works even better if the player system of the casino does not just collect the player’s information on the gaming side, but also collects other spending in the resort. For example, the Konami player tracking system actually allows the resort to track not just the gaming, but also the other spending of customers throughout the resort. So with that our system can work the best because we can really optimise the decision on the hotel room based on the patron’s total spend.
CI: Does this work with all systems? MB: We’re not interfaced with every system yet
30 APRIL 2015
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