It’s not every day that we get the pleasure of bringing together nearly 800 of our customers, partners, and industry leaders for networking, thought-provoking panel discussions and inspiring talks. And that’s exactly why we love our annual event Mews Unfold.
As if all that wasn’t enough excitement, it was also the perfect opportunity for Mews CPTO, Josef (Pepa) Starychfojtu, and other Mews product and tech leaders to share some of the biggest updates to Mews Hospitality Cloud.
Important, though, to set the scene is to understand how we think about the technology we develop. As Pepa said, “It’s time we think about technology as a solution to our biggest problems and as a business driver.”
He encouraged the audience to examine the impact of their technology in five key areas: guest experience, guest lifetime value, revenue per square meter, revenue per employee and time on tasks.
So maybe it’s more than a little coincidental that the product launches announced by Pepa and is his team directly impact these critical indicators of growth in hospitality.
Revolutionizing the Guest Journey
Mews is guest-centric – meaning our platform is built around the guest profile first, inventory second. As part of that commitment, we’re constantly updating our technology to stay ahead of changing guest expectations.
As Adam Britton, Group Product Leader for our guest experience products, explained, our ultimate goal is to make Mews so smart and easy to use that staff spend minimal time looking at screens and can focus nearly all of their attention on guests.
A few months ago, we announced a major overhaul to Mews Kiosk, offering new high-touch as well as low-touch features to satisfy the needs of properties ranging from staff-less hotels to hostels to luxury boutique properties.
Now we’re taking the potential of Mews Kiosk even further. Not only will guests be able to add products and services to their reservation during kiosk check-in as they can today, but soon they’ll also be able to select a room upgrade during the self-check-in. This is yet another opportunity to improve the guest experience while also unlocking more revenue effortlessly.
As for payments, we’re making that easier too. Integrated payment terminals let guests handle payments on their own, but for hotels that prefer a different method, we’ll let you display a QR code on the kiosk screen that guests can use to complete a payment on their smartphones.
Kiosk offers major benefits for a self-service, efficient experience, but for properties and guests that want a friction-free experience, there’s always been one obstacle – the need for guests to stop at the front desk to get their room key.
We’re thrilled to announce that we found a better way and it’s now available to customers. Drum roll…
Digital Key
Digital Key is the final step in providing your guests with a completely contactless experience from booking to check-out.
Once a guest completes their online check-in, with just two more taps, a digital key is loaded on their phone, ready to be activated at the pre-determined check-in time. At that point, guests can go straight to their rooms without stopping at the front desk for even one moment.
Since every hotel is unique, we’re also making sure you have the freedom to customize Digital Key as needed; you can exclude certain room categories, check the reservation's balance, and check for a pre-authorization among other options. Your hotel, your rules.
Smarter tech for better experiences
We all know that technology is getting smarter and smarter. While some people worry that it will remove the human connection from hospitality, we anticipate it having the opposite effect. As we see it, technology is there to make hospitality more human.
During his presentation at Unfold, Conor Winders, VP of Product Engineering at Mews, shared the new and exciting ways that we’re making Mews more intelligent, more intuitive and more helpful.
Every day, Conor explained, hotel staff perform hundreds of thousands of searches in Mews. Each of those searches requires the staff member to stop looking at their guest and to focus on a screen. Not exactly what hospitality should be.
Over the past few weeks, we launched improvements in search accuracy and search speed and made the search function more feature-rich. You can now search reservations by companion (not just the main guest), by availability blocks, view search history, and even favorite commonly used searches.
But, as we said, technology is getting smarter too. Mews will soon be able to predict your next step, letting you perform actions inside the search itself.
Let’s say you're about to check in a guest, Mews will know if that guest is a VIP, will anticipate that you’ll want to offer an upgrade, and will make it easy for you to apply the upgrade in one simple action.
Next gen Mews:
All this is just a start.
Enter the next generation of Mews: taking guest experience and personalized service to a new level with the help of smart tech.
We’re teaching the system to understand natural language and even act like an assistant to help staff perform a variety of tasks.
Staff will be able to type in a very natural question, and, by accessing our knowledge-based articles and Mews community, they’ll be given step-by-step instructions and tips for success all in a chat interface available right in the side panel.
And there’s more on the topic of tips – smart tips.
By analyzing thousands of data points from previous stays and combining it with real-time context, Mews can give staff the insights they need at the precise moment they need it.
This is not just a vision. It’s reality. We’re now rolling out these capabilities, dramatically boosting productivity and saving staff countless hours.
“With Mews AI, you have a powerful tool at your fingertips to drive your business forward,” Conor said.
Wrap up
A completely contactless guest journey, smarter technology that empowers staff, and a platform that drives better business decisions. These exciting capabilities are now available in Mews. But, as Mews VP of Design Juan Hidalgo reminded the audience at Unfold, it’s an exciting time to be in hospitality – and the ability to shape the future of is in everyone’s hands.
He summed up the future of Mews and the future of hospitality this way: “By crafting the future, we are redefining the present.”
Are you ready to craft the future with us?
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