Hotel revenue management system decision: enterprise grade vs the newer more affordable automation focused ones, which is actually better and why?
I own a 90-room independent and I'll be upfront, I'm not a revenue management expert. My third-party revenue manager put a bunch of options in front of me: Duetto and IDeaS on the 'enterprise side', RoomPriceGenie and Atomize on the more modern/new, lower-cost automation side. The price gap between the two camps is meaningful and I'm trying to figure out if the enterprise systems are worth it for a property like mine, or if the newer ones have closed the gap enough that paying up doesn't make sense anymore.
The pitch from the enterprise side is basically that the science is deeper, the forecasting is more sophisticated, and you get more control over segmentation and group business. The pitch from the newer side is that machine learning has gotten good enough that the automation just works, you don't need a full-time revenue manager to babysit it, and you get 80% of the value at lower cost.
What I can't tell from demos is which of those is actually true in practice. Are the enterprise systems genuinely better at pricing, or are you mostly paying for the brand, the integrations, and the consulting layer around them? And on the flip side, do the newer ones hold up once you have any real complexity, like groups, multiple segments, or a shoulder season that behaves weird?
Curious to hear from people who've used both, or who started on one and moved to the other. At what point does it make sense to pay enterprise prices, and at what point are you just lighting money on fire because the newer tools would have done the job?
For context, single property, on a modern PMS, ADR around $240, leisure market, heavy weekend skew. No plans to grow into a portfolio.