Less admin, more community: how Ostello Bello runs its Italian hostels with Mews

About Ostello Bello 

Ostello Bello opened in Milan in 2011, started by friends who had met each other in hostels across South America and Europe and came home to find their own city had almost none. They built one in the middle of Milan, with a bar attached and the doors open to the neighborhood as well as guests. 

Fifteen years on, the group runs 13 properties from Como to Palermo, a hotel in Genova, and a fourteenth opening in Lecce. The thinking has not changed. The bars and the activities are open to guests and locals alike and staff are hired from the city wherever possible, so the person behind the desk can provide true local tips. 

Most guests arrive wanting to see the city. What they remember is who they met while they were there. Protecting that, as the group grew from three properties to 13, is the job technology makes possible.  

Training in two days, not two weeks 

Challenge 

Ostello Bello’s front desks are run by young staff who move on quickly, and their previous system took weeks to learn. With new properties opening, seasonal peaks to cover and the busyness of day-to-day operations, there was never a spare month for training. 

Solution 

Mews puts the everyday jobs where a new starter can find them. Reservations, check-ins, billing and rooming work the same way in every property, so someone trained in Milano Centrale can cover a shift in Milano Duomo – or any of the hostel locations. This modern interface, combined with cloud-native technology, were the primary reasons behind the move to Mews. 

And the knock-on effect turned out to be bigger than training time. Once the back office stopped requiring expertise, the job description changed. What the group hires for now is the ability to talk to people. 

Result 

• New front desk staff confidently working shifts in just two days 
• No month-long training program to schedule or staff 
• Around 80% of back-office tasks no longer need an experienced operator 
• Hiring now leads with guest-facing skills rather than system knowledge 

Italian compliance without the daily paperwork 

Challenge 

Italy asks more of a hotelier than most markets. Guest data has to be filed with the police every day: names and addresses for every person in the building. At Ostello Bello it was typed in by hand, from passports, one guest at a time, across every property. 

Solution 

Registration is now an ID or passport capture at check-in. Mews builds the file, and the team uploads it to the Italian police portal. Rates and distribution rules live in Mews too, so nobody is sitting at a screen updating a number by hand. 

Result 

• Daily police reporting reduced to an ID capture and a file upload 
• Fewer errors in data that must be legally accurate 
• Revenue team reporting pulled from Mews rather than assembled by hand 

Embedded payments that automate charges 

Challenge 

All payments previously went through a card terminal by hand, including the least popular job at any hostel: charging a no-show on a non-refundable booking. It was slow, awkward and easy to get wrong. 

Solution 

With Mews Payments, charges run against the reservation automatically. Pre-arrival payments, no-shows and cancellations are handled by the policy rather than by whoever happens to be on shift. 

Result 

• No-show and non-refundable charges collected automatically 
• Manual terminal work removed from the front desk routine 
• Fewer payment errors and less time spent correcting them 

A booking engine guests actually use 

Challenge 

Hostels rely on OTAs. They fill beds, but they take a big cut every time. Building a direct channel that guests actually use, without adding work for a front desk that is already busy, is the harder half of the job. 

Solution 

Mews Booking Engine sits on the same data as the rest of the system, so a direct booking arrives complete and needs no re-keying. Guests can add extras as they book, and the team gets a reservation that needs no cleaning up. 

Result 

• Front desk no longer re-keys or tidies up direct reservations by hand 
• A growing share of bookings placed directly through Mews Booking Engine 
• 9,121 upsells sold through the booking flow in the past year, on top of 71,551 at the front desk 
• Commission kept on every direct booking – and the guest relationship with it 

One building, two businesses 

Challenge 

The Genova property is two floors of hostel underneath four floors of hotel. Two businesses, two rate strategies, two kinds of guest, one front door. Running it on two systems would have been a challenge. 

Solution 

Working with Mews, the team used bookable services to run the hotel alongside the hostel inside a single account. It was an unusual use of the feature at the time, but it has been the setup ever since. 

The same creative thinking and system flexibility shows elsewhere in their operations. Italian fiscal rules are unusually strict, and the group has been inventive with how it uses billing in Mews to meet them. 

Result 

• Hotel and hostel operating from one Mews account in one building 
• Guests moved between floors without leaving the system 
• One set of reporting across both businesses 

The first Mews customer in Italy, and still growing 

Challenge 

Ostello Bello had already changed system twice and didn’t want to do it again. The Italian market offered a choice of compromises. Hostel-specific systems could handle dorm beds but not invoicing or police reporting. Italian systems handled the legal side but were built for rooms, not beds. 

Solution 

Mews did both, and Ostello Bello became the first Mews customer in Italy with three hostels live. Since then, the partnership has grown from strength to strength. When the group needs another tool, the connection either exists or is straightforward to build. Today, 18 marketplace apps run across the group’s properties, from SiteMinder and Lightspeed to a door system and an Italian invoicing connector. Flexkeeping, chosen after reviewing ten alternatives, is now a Mews product. 

Result 

• Thirteen properties running on Mews, with Lecce opening by the end of the year 
• No system migration in seven years of growth 
• 18 marketplace integrations live across the group 
• Housekeeping and maintenance standards verified across the chain without phone calls or photo checks 

Looking ahead 

Lecce opens by the end of the year, and multi-property functionality is rolling out across the group. Self-service arrival is next, giving guests another way to arrive on their own terms while staff stay focused on the moments that matter. 

This is what Ostello Bello has been offering since 2011. There are countless ways to research a city now, between blogs, Reels, TikTok and AI. Yet guests still walk up to the desk and ask a person where to get a pizza. Every hour the system takes back is an hour someone can spend answering.