Many hotels want to eliminate middlemen distributors of their rooms, like Booking.com and other travel agencies, which charge high commissions.
Duetto aims to help hotels optimize their rates using its software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. Today the US startup said it had closed a $21 million financing led by Accel Partners.
The Series B round included current investors Altimeter Capital, Battery Ventures, Thayer Lodging chief executive Leland Pillsbury, and Salesforce.com.
Neither a valuation nor terms were disclosed.
Duetto’s CEO, Patrick Bosworth, said the funding would be used to extend the company’s global reach in Europe and Asia. Its main competitors include Rainmaker and IDeaS.
The round comes nearly two years after a $10 million Series A, plus an earlier $2.1 million raise.
Recent patents
In June, the US Patent and Trademark Office office granted Duetto a patent for a product summarized this way:
"A travel alert manager receives travel data from a plurality of data sources and identifies an alert data type from the travel data.
The travel alert manager generates an alert for the alert data type based on a primary alert condition, the alert to provide a notification that the travel data will affect a travel property.
The travel alert manager determines a priority of the alert and issues the alert if alerts matching the priority of the alert are authorized by system settings."
In March, the patent office received an application from Duetto that's similarly intriguing. The patent describes...
"a profit optimization module identifies historical transaction data associated with a travel property.
The historical transaction data includes bookings made for a same day of the week as the day of arrival during a forecast period for a plurality of previous weeks.
The profit optimization module also identifies lost business data associated with the travel property from the historical transaction data. The lost business data includes at least one of a regret or a denial.
The profit optimization module forecasts a demand for bookings at the travel property on a day of arrival, wherein the demand for bookings is based on at least in part on the historical transaction data and the lost business data.
In addition, the profit optimization module determines an offer price for a booking of a unit at the travel property, wherein the offer price is based on a capacity of the travel property and the forecasted demand for bookings at the travel property, and wherein the offer price is designed to increase a profit for the travel property."
Big Data focus
Cofounders Bosworth and Marco Benvenuti previously worked at Wynn Resorts and other casino hotels, while co-founder Craig Weissman, was previously chief technology officer of Salesforce.com.
The company says that, since its founding in 2012, it has signed "hundreds of properties and is currently deployed in 16 countries."