Hotels Are Still Optimizing for RevPAR. RevPAR Doesn't Predict Profit.

Hotels are still optimizing for RevPAR, and RevPAR doesn’t predict profit — that’s the throughline of a new Duetto piece featuring HotStats CEO Michael Grove and Duetto Senior Director Nick Knight, which names three structural barriers keeping hotels revenue-centric instead of profit-centric and proposes “performance engineering” as the fix. The first barrier is incentive design: RevPAR ignores acquisition costs, channel commissions, and ancillary revenue, so a team can grow topline revenue while eroding margin — why institutional investors are shifting toward GOPPAR and net operating income instead. The second is data access: profit data is scattered across departments and typically reconciled only monthly or quarterly, far too slow for daily commercial decisions spanning rooms, F&B, spa, and conferences. The third is operationalization — moving teams from intuition-based budgeting to evidence-based metrics like GOPPAR and TRevPAR. The piece points to Duetto’s Advance, an AI-powered demand-intelligence tool, alongside HotStats’ benchmarking product, as the technology closing the data-speed gap by surfacing profit signals in near real time.

Duetto has been building this argument since June. Duetto’s earlier piece on performance engineering first coined the term and put a number on the incentive problem: Americas flow-through rates hit just 18% in 2025 even as RevPAR kept climbing, meaning two hotels with identical RevPAR can have very different profitability once channel mix and labor costs are counted. That piece’s prescribed fix — Duetto’s RP-OS, combining its revenue-management tools with HotStats’ profit-benchmarking data — is the same product pairing this new article cites.

Hospitality Net’s coverage of decision lag names the second barrier from a different vendor’s angle: LodgIQ’s Samuel Johnson argues “visibility is not the same as decision speed,” breaking the typical revenue-reporting workflow into seven delay points and arguing AI’s real value is closing the gap between when a signal appears and when a decision executes — not adding more dashboards.

For hospitality operators, the pattern across both pieces is the same: the RMS vendors are converging on profit speed, not just profit visibility, as the next competitive line.