Duetto, the San Francisco-based hospitality technology company, has appointed Michael Schäffner as Chief Sales Officer (CSO), elevating him from his previous position as Senior Vice President of Global Sales. In his new role, Schäffner will lead Duetto’s global commercial organisation, spearheading go-to-market strategy, expanding enterprise and brand relationships, and building out the high-performance sales engine underpinning the company’s Revenue & Profit Operating System (RP-OS).
The appointment marks the latest step in a sustained leadership investment at Duetto as the company accelerates the rollout of its RP-OS platform across hotel brands, groups and casino resorts worldwide. CEO Alex Zoghlin described Schäffner as instrumental in constructing the commercial foundation from which the company now operates at scale. “As we expand our global footprint and deepen our relationships with enterprise customers, his leadership will be critical in establishing Duetto as the performance platform the industry relies on,” Zoghlin said.
Schäffner brings close to two decades of experience spanning both on-property hospitality and technology sales — a combination that distinguishes him in a sector where commercial and operational credibility carry equal weight. His career began with a management traineeship at Auberge du Soleil in California’s Napa Valley, a Relais & Châteaux property, followed by a role as Tower Services Manager at The Setai in Miami, a member of The Leading Hotels of the World. He later returned to Germany, where he opened Roomers Frankfurt as Resident Manager at the age of 27 — the property being a member of Design Hotels.
The transition into technology came in 2010, when Schäffner joined Nor1, a hotel technology startup, in Frankfurt. He spent approximately three and a half years there, progressing from Account Revenue Manager to Director of Strategic Accounts, before moving to Serenata IntraWare as Director of Sales and Marketing for the EMEA region. He also served as a guest lecturer at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW), from which he holds a degree in business administration.
Schäffner joined Duetto in March 2017 as Director of Sales for the DACH region — Germany, Austria and Switzerland — becoming the company’s first employee on the ground in Germany. Over the following eight years, he steadily expanded his remit: promoted to Vice President of Sales EMEA in February 2021, he was simultaneously appointed to the Board of Directors of HSMAI Region Europe in June of that year. In September 2025, he was elevated to Senior Vice President of Global Sales before assuming the CSO title in May 2026.
His ascent tracks closely with Duetto’s own trajectory. The company, widely recognised as a pioneer of Open Pricing, has been named the world’s number one revenue management system in the HotelTechAwards for four consecutive years, from 2022 to 2025. Now serving more than 20,000 properties globally, Duetto has moved decisively beyond traditional revenue management with the launch of its RP-OS in June 2025 — a platform designed to bring together pricing, demand signals, forecasting, group business management and P&L benchmarking under a single unified framework.
Central to that evolution was the acquisition of HotStats in April 2025. HotStats, a global leader in hotel financial benchmarking, brought full P&L intelligence into Duetto’s platform, enabling commercial teams to connect revenue decisions directly to profit outcomes. The combined offering addresses an acute pressure point identified in joint research published in January 2026: while global RevPAR has grown 19 per cent since 2019, the cost of acquiring bookings has surged by 25 per cent — compressing flow-through rates and exposing the limits of revenue-only thinking.
Schäffner’s appointment as CSO places him at the forefront of positioning RP-OS as the standard commercial operating system for the hotel industry. Having witnessed the company’s growth from a market entrant to a global leader, he is candid about the scale of the opportunity. “The industry has optimised for revenue for decades. The next chapter is about profit, and that requires a fundamentally different approach,” he said. “Revenue without profit is only half the picture. The winners in the next decade will be the ones who connect every commercial decision directly to profit outcomes.”
Duetto is currently backed by private equity firm GrowthCurve Capital, which acquired the business in 2024 and has supported its subsequent expansion. The appointment of Schäffner as CSO consolidates a senior leadership team that includes Chief Marketing Officer Olly Lynch, Chief Customer Officer Jason (appointed June 2025) and Chief Human Resources Officer Linda (appointed February 2025) — suggesting a company in active organisational build-out ahead of its next growth phase.
