It’s likely that a few people were rubbing their eyes in surprise when we made the announcement that Mews is acquiring leading ePOS system, Bizzon. Perhaps you were one of them. However, the move makes a lot of sense and is hugely exciting not just for Mews customers, but for our industry as a whole. Here’s why.
Expanding our core technology offering
Until now, every Mews acquisition had been another hospitality cloud. Acquiring Planet Winner, Base7booking and Hotel Perfect allowed us to increase our customer base and add outstanding talent to our team, but it didn’t necessarily broaden what Mews could offer in terms of product.
Bizzon is different. They’re an electronic point of sale system (ePOS for short) that serve thousands of businesses across 15 countries in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Their technology revolves around something that Mews currently doesn’t do: F&B management with digital ordering, inventory and payments.
As the hospitality landscape has continued to evolve, it became clear to us that point of sale is now a core technology for the vast majority of hoteliers – and that adding an ePOS solution to Mews Hospitality Cloud would be a natural extension to our functionality.
This all rolls up into our belief that hospitality needs to move away from thinking primarily in terms of rooms. Instead, guests should be at the heart of your operations. By the way, you’re going to hear a lot from us this year about being guest-centric, so please forgive us in advance...
Adding POS to Mews helps us in our guest-centricity mission. It’s another step towards creating a 360° guest profile that can ultimately lead to fewer process-driven actions for guests. They’ll be able to focus more on the experiences that matter, also aided by more tailored marketing in real-time and on-property.
Our vision for a fully integrated ePOS
This all sounds great in theory, but what does this vision look like in practice?
It gives guests even more freedom in choosing their own payment journey. If they’re at a hotel bar or restaurant, they shouldn’t need to wait for a bill to leave; they should be able to scan a QR code or tell the waiter to put it on room. And why do they need to be in the restaurant to make an order? If the technology is integrated, guests should be able to order via app to their room or ahead of time, with the bill automatically posted to their guest profile.
Running guest-centric operations isn’t just upside for your guests: it empowers hoteliers too.
In the above example, the restaurant will get their table back sooner, meaning more diners can be served. You’ll have more data about guest habits, which will help you optimize demand with tables and covers in a similar way to how you optimize rooms.
You can also add time saving and streamlining to the list of benefits. Managing multiple solutions from multiple vendors isn’t always easy, and combining two of your most important technologies into the same software ecosystem means you’ll only have one vendor to work with. In essence, you cut out the middleman for all things POS, from contract queries to handling bugs.
Better guest insights are also on the menu. I already hinted at this when I mentioned tailored marketing – by including F&B data in guest profiles, you’ll build a set of super rich data that will help you understand your customers more and optimize accordingly. Combine this with consolidated reporting and you can make smarter decisions.
More importantly, in a time where staff shortages are still a major concern, a combined PMS/POS can make a difference. Front of house and restaurant teams can be training on the same software, meaning you can be more agile when it comes to staffing your property. Oh, and it should also be faster to onboard new employees.
Finally, in combination with our new SpaceTime capabilities, the innovation that this implies for F&B is staggering. What if you had the ability to look at separate tables as having different attributes (higher priced items if you have a better view); if you could price food items depending on the hour of day (higher priced coffee in the morning); if you had the ability to price not only per transaction but per hour of occupied seat (if the 7pm crowd all spends the same, why not think about set menu tickets?). There is still a world of innovation that hasn’t quite changed the way hospitality providers monetize their F&B offerings, and we believe this is where Mews and Bizzon’s expertise can bring an epochal change.
An exciting future awaits
This doesn’t mean that every current or future Mews property has to use Bizzon as their ePOS provider. We’re still fully committed to our Marketplace and believe that hoteliers should choose the solution that best serves their property and their customers – you can view our 40+ amazing POS partners here.
That being said, we do think the Bizzon product is outstanding and will continue to develop its functionality as we merge it into the Mews back-end and ecosystem.
Despite the tough period that our industry has recently endured, I’m incredibly excited about what 2022 will bring. Our acquisition of Bizzon is only the beginning of what will be another transformational year for Mews.
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