It’s rare in life to find someone who can honestly say they love their job. We are lucky here at Duetto in that we have a whole team of dedicated people who are passionate about revenue management and genuinely love what they do day, after day. We think that’s pretty special.
One shining example of this is Daniel Lofton, a Director of Hospitality Solutions at Duetto, specifically handling the North American West Coast. He has been with Duetto for four years, having discovered a love of hospitality and revenue management back in college. Here he tells us what attracted him to this particular discipline, what led him to Duetto and why he loves what he does so much.
Q: What does your average day look like as a Director of Hospitality Solutions?
My role here at Duetto is primarily helping hoteliers solve any problems they face related to revenue management. This means I mostly spend my time talking with hoteliers that are considering using Duetto’s revenue management system, showing them how they could improve their current revenue management process.
Q: What sparked your interest in revenue management and what do you like most about it?
I studied, and fell in love with, hospitality at Conrad Hilton College at the University of Houston. While there I covered every facet of hospitality. It was difficult at first figuring out exactly what I wanted to do, so I interned in many different roles within the industry, including housekeeping.
But, my interest always lay in numbers, technology and sales - all of which come together in revenue management, and that really appealed to me. The revenue manager at Landry’s in downtown Houston (my first job!) was my mentor - a real powerhouse of a woman - and so I just went from there, starting from the ground up.
Following on from that I became the Director of Revenue for a Louisiana Casino Resort, and now I’m here! I’ve always been big on technology and so revenue management was an obvious discipline for me, and I’ve had a blast doing it!
Q: Tell us a little about how you came to join the Duetto family.
When I was at the resort in Louisiana, Duetto was actively trying to sell their solution to us. In the end we didn’t take it on but I got to talking with Duetto and a while later they called me to ask if I would like to come on board, as an opportunity in the company’s casino team here in Texas had arisen. So although my company in Louisiana didn’t adopt Duetto, Duetto adopted me!
It was a great opportunity for me to make the move back to Texas and so I was happy to do so. The job is remote-based, which is just perfect. It turns out working from home is pretty cool!
Q: Fantastic! What do you love most about your job?
I love solving problems; I'm a problem solver. We have a lot of hoteliers come to us with lots of different problems. Almost all of them will tell us that they have a very unique situation or that they don't do things the same way as everyone else. But actually there is a tremendous amount of uniformity amongst hoteliers and there are lots of exceptional things that we all do every day.
However, there are a lot of problems out there related to revenue management. It’s a relatively young discipline compared to other hospitality disciplines such as housekeeping or front office. As a result of that, there is still a lot of room for refinement and I enjoy being able to help hoteliers do that. A lot of North American hoteliers don't have a revenue manager, particularly some of the independent, non-branded properties. So there's a huge opportunity out there for us to help people in the field and I love doing that.
Q: Why would you encourage people interested in revenue management to come and work for Duetto?
Why Duetto? Well, personally I have a lot of fun working here because it gives me an opportunity to connect with hoteliers from everywhere - Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and obviously North America - and it really is a lot of fun.
With hospitality there are so many different perspectives and so many different ways to run things. It's very enriching as a hospitality professional because you get to understand the way that other hotels think and do things. For example, resorts versus urban hotels or casino resorts versus boutique hotels. Plus, we put a really cool tech spin on hospitality which means we get to work in the hospitality industry but we also get to work with technology experts to learn how to solve people’s problems in our own space.
We’ve always been a customer-forward company, which you certainly can't say about every hospitality tech company out there. We have a really strong group of people who are all about hospitality and really are passionate about solving hospitality problems. We get to have a lot of good internal dialogue about how we can do that and why it's so important, and we get to have a lot of really cool conversations with hoteliers which help us learn more about how we can help them. And so those are the many reasons I enjoy it so much!