Intersection of Hospitality Technology and Profitability With Travis Weber

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. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: • [00:00] Introduction • [2:18] How selling ski trips in his hometown of Taos, New Mexico shaped how Travis Weber thinks about revenue and cost • [4:42] Why ski resorts run a higher-margin model than hotels, and what that teaches about managing the bottom line • [7:31] The commodity-versus-experience debate, and why budget hotels shouldn't stop selling an experience • [14:04] What Travis learned at Expedia about OTAs acting as a hotel's marketing arm • [16:41] Busting the myth that OTAs are only there to steal your piece of the pie • [23:17] Why a 100-room hotel without a revenue management system is probably leaving money on the table • [34:27] The mindset gap between hotels that get value from an RMS and those that treat it like a fancy spreadsheet • [43:40] How Duetto's HotStats acquisition and AI are shifting hotels from top-line RevPAR to bottom-line profit In this episode… 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. Resources mentioned in this episode: • Kin Sio on LinkedIn -   / kinsio   • Lights On - https://www.lightson.co/ • Travis Weber: LinkedIn -   / stravisweber   • Travis Weber: Email - [email protected] • Duetto - https://www.duettocloud.com/en-us/ • HotStats - https://www.hotstats.com/ • Expedia - https://www.expedia.com/ • Vrbo - https://www.vrbo.com/ Sponsor for this episode... 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 http://lightson.co to learn more. Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company - https://rise25.com/