The acquisition
Although the acquisition went through at the beginning of 2024, the wheels had been set in motion years before. I’ve known Joe Kiernan, Founder and CEO of Frontdesk Anywhere, for a long time and we were delighted when Joe and team reached out to ignite the acquisition conversation.
The North American market has become a key focus for Mews in the past couple of years, and we’ve seen phenomenal organic growth. However, it’s always been our strategy to supplement this growth with investment, and our acquisition of Hotello last year was our first in the region.
Spurred on by that success – in terms of customer enthusiasm and how well the Hotello team has integrated into Mews – Frontdesk Anywhere was the perfect candidate to further increase our footprint.
The company fit
Whenever Mews acquires a company, a tremendous amount of due diligence goes into researching not only the financial side of things, but also the company and team culture. That’s because we’re not interested in asset stripping or in acting like a Private Equity Investor: we want to keep adding talent to the Mews team by bringing in more priceless hospitality experience.
Joe founded Frontdesk Anywhere back in 2009, so they actually had a three-year head start on Mews. Many of their current team members were around in those early days, and that’s a huge wealth of industry knowledge that we’ll be able to draw upon.
The company was born and raised in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the beating heart of technology innovation. I’ve no doubt this helped to nurture the forward-thinking mindset that made them hugely popular with their customers and their huge success in the intervening years.
The customer fit
One of the main reasons both sides were keen on the deal is that Mews is so clearly a great fit for Frontdesk Anywhere customers. For a start, they’re both award-winning cloud-native platforms with an agile and guest-first mindset.
There’s also fantastic product alignment in terms of features and philosophy, and from all the conversations we’ve had with their incredible hoteliers, it’s heartening to see they also share our vision to create remarkable hospitality experiences. In other words, I’m very confident of a smooth transition for Frontdesk Anywhere customers.
The future
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Mews has big plans for North America. 2023 was not only a big year of growth for our customer base (we more than doubled our number of properties in the region), but we also added lots of incredible talent to our team on the ground, including the appointment of Davin Fan in a brand new role of General Manager for North America.
The addition of Joe and the Frontdesk Anywhere team makes us even stronger, and it’s obvious from talking to their hoteliers that they’re held in very high regard. Speaking of whom, it’s only fair to give Joe the final word:
“We are very proud of the brand we created and have built in Frontdesk Anywhere. We’re also thankful to our supporters, team and customers around the world, especially those who took a chance on us in those early years as we brought hospitality into the cloud. But it’s also a great feeling to be starting a new chapter with Mews. I’ve seen from previous acquisitions how well they integrate new people, and you can feel the genuine hospitality passion in every Mewser you meet. I love their ambition to transform the industry and truly believe that we can help them do it.”
If you think your business could bring real value to the Mews community, why not reach out to our Mews Ventures team and start a confidential conversation?
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