How Lark's Bluebird Hunter Lodge freed its team from the back office to focus on guests

About Bluebird Hunter Lodge

Bluebird Hunter Lodge is a 44-room upper-upscale boutique hotel in the village of Hunter, New York, part of the Lark Hotels collection. Nestled in the Catskill Mountains, it draws families escaping New York City, skiers, and weekenders looking for something more personal than a chain hotel. The lodge runs a tavern, bar, and restaurant on-site and is defined by its quirky architecture, living-room atmosphere, and a team that builds the kind of personal touches — seasonal traditions, remembered preferences, handwritten gestures — that turn first-time guests into regulars.

For General Manager Rachel Haines, hospitality is the whole point. Every minute the team spends on administration is a minute not spent on a guest. That standard drove the move to Mews PMS and Mews Payments in early 2025, with the goal of eliminating the back-office friction that was pulling staff away from the floor.

Eliminating payment friction and folio admin

Challenge

Before Mews, manual payment handling and folio corrections were a constant drain on the team's time. When a guest's card needed to be moved between folios, or a charge corrected after check-out, it required staff to step away from the desk and into the system. For a lean team in a seasonal market, that overhead compounded quickly. The more time spent on transactions, the less time available for the guest interactions that define the Bluebird experience.

Solution

Mews Payments automated the card-on-file workflow end to end. Guest cards are tokenized at booking, charges are applied automatically, and the folio corrections that previously consumed staff time essentially stopped. "If my employees are not constantly looking at and fixing folios or moving payments," says Haines, "it becomes less of a transaction and more of a conversation." The team stopped processing credit cards and started having them.

Result

●      Card-on-file payments fully automated, eliminating manual folio corrections

●      $2.25M in payments processed YTD through Mews Payments with no manual reconciliation

●      [X hrs] saved per week on payment admin — to confirm with Rachel

Rate visibility that lets the team react to the market

Challenge

The Catskills market is seasonal with real demand variability — a busy ski weekend can fill fast, while a mid-week shoulder period needs active management to hold rate. The lodge needed to adjust pricing in response to local demand without manual updates creating bottlenecks. The gap between what the market would bear and what the property could confidently charge was a recurring friction point.

Solution

The native rate management tools in Mews PMS gave the team the visibility they needed. Rates can be pushed or pulled for high-demand or shoulder periods without navigating complex manual processes. For a property where a few peak nights carry a disproportionate share of annual revenue, the ability to respond quickly to demand matters.

Result

●      Rate adjustments now made directly in Mews PMS without manual workarounds

●      58.3% average occupancy and $183.19 ADR maintained across a seasonal market — confirm with Rachel whether these represent improvement vs. pre-Mews

Guest profiles that turn every visit into a relationship

Challenge

For a lodge built on repeat visitors and personal touches, the knowledge of what guests care about — preferences, anniversaries, past stays — was held in individual team members' heads. When staff changed or guests visited on different shifts, that continuity was at risk. There was no single place to record and act on the details that make a returnee feel recognized.

Solution

Mews stores guest preferences and visit history against each profile, accessible to the whole team. The guest who prefers a particular room type, the couple celebrating an anniversary, the regular who always requests a specific pillow — all of it is captured and retrievable. This turns institutional memory into a property-wide capability.

Result

●      Guest preferences and visit history centralized in Mews profiles

●      Team able to execute high-touch gestures — including a same-day proposal setup — with time freed from admin