Transcript
Introduction to Mews features
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks. This week, I'm alone because I actually want to share some of my favorite features in Mews.
And these are some of the features that might not be as obvious, but I think that they have real value and they're worth getting highlighted.
So in this week's Matt Talk, I will give you the ten favorite features of me that I like the most that I think could have potential impact if hoteliers find out about them. And I have two bonus features at the end of this MadTalk where I give you some upcoming features that I get excited about for a release and I've been pushing hard to get released and I've been testing them and they work so well. So I want to talk to those particular features.
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Feature 1: Apple Wallet
Let's start with the ten features that already exist that you can use today that are really, really impactful.
The first feature is Apple Wallet. We have been working relentlessly for the last year together with Apple and with ASSA ABLOY to get Apple Wallet deployed.
You've seen big announcements of it, but I haven't really seen it, live in hotels. And we have now released this app news unfold. And honestly, what they've done, it's so smart and so seamless that I think it's worth the number one spot.
The idea that you have a digital app installed on your phone, like with Marriott, with Hilton, all these big brands have their app. And then once you've checked in online, you have to wait for your key to come at three o'clock only. And then every time you have to enter the lift or go to the room or to the gym, you have to find the app because I've hidden them in the subfolder. You have to open the the key, you have to press it, you have to wait for the Bluetooth to respond.
It is annoying if you open the doors at high frequency. So like it works beautifully, but it's not seamless, not as seamless as a plastic key. What Apple Wallet's done is it downloads that key during the online check-in directory on your phone. It also works with the kiosk, so the kiosk will allow you to instantly download that key on the phone.
And unlike with Apple Pay where you have to constantly use your facial recognition, actually, it just sits on your phone. So you can just hold your phone to the lock or you can just hold your Apple Watch to the lock and it instantly opens. And that's the beauty of it. It is so incredibly seamless.
And even if your battery dies, it still has couple of hours of juice in it to open the door lock. So whilst you might not be able to operate your phone or your your your watch for other things, the door lock will always still continue to open. And because of that, I think it it's worth that number one spot. So if you're using ASSA ABLOY locks in your hotel on Vostio or Vision online, you can now upgrade to the Apple Wallet.
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Feature 2: Match and merge profiles
The second one is around match and merch. We've released this great feature of match and merch recently, where we try and identify two profiles that look the same. If we recognize the guest names or passport numbers or email address or phone numbers, we're suggesting to match and merge. And we've gamified it a little bit and we're starting to see hotels really embracing the fun of matching and merging. The latest addition to this is that we can also match anonymous, postings from the restaurant now. So because we do payments in the property management system, but also the point of sale in the restaurant, as in when you go to the restaurant and you pay with Apple Wallet, I I tend to, in hotel restaurants now, pay with Apple Wallet because I find it easier than having to write on a piece of paper my room number, my last name, and, signature.
It's just easier with Apple Wallet. So one of the the downside of that is that we we don't track that revenue back to the guest profile, anymore.
But with this feature that we have introduced, if the hotel uses both the Mews POS and the Mews PMS, we actually can connect the dots. So when you, use Apple wallets or Google wallets to pay or even your credit card to pay in the restaurant, anonymously, that charge can now be traced back. And in the matching merchant, it will show up saying, we've got this charge. We recognize the credit card. Is this mister Jones? And then we can merge it and then you start to collect that full customer lifetime value across that profile.
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Feature 3: Tracking guest lifetime value
And that does lead me to the third feature which is guest lifetime value.
This is the holy grail of hospitality.
Every hotel around the world has been trying to figure out how do we track how much guests spend with us across their lifetime, not just room revenue, but total revenue. And I think it's the total revenue aspect that's the hardest because there's so many charges that are being done against a profile from an OTA where we can't connect because that's with, anonymous email address, these anonymous charges that are happening in the restaurants. So we've now been able to connect all those dots, all the revenues linked back to the centralized guest profile. And if you go to the guest profile in Mews on the dashboard tab, we've now added these boxes at the top. So we tell you how many times his guest has stayed, so that you never have to ask them if they've been there before. But it also tells you how much revenue that that guest has spent so that you know whether this is a high value customer for you or not, and then you can act on that.
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Feature 4: AI tooltips for personalization
The fourth category that I get really excited about is the AI tooltips that we've deployed, I think it's about a year ago, but it's had a real impact and we've started injecting it in different parts of the system. So what we do is we consume all of the information we have about the guests. So if they've been there previously, we read all the reservation notes, we read all of the guest notes. So if, for example, they had a complaint, then that's in there.
If we you work with a platform like, for example, guest review, the reviews that they leave after they left last time, we get pushed back into the guest profile. And the information from that, we feed into our AI so that when they now get to arrival of their upcoming stay, you get these tweet size summaries directly on your guest profile, helping the receptionists to have that really personal conversation or making sure that they're ready for your allergies if you are allergic to feathers, for example. And these AI tools have been incredibly helpful, and we now do over one point six million of those notes every single week for our customers.
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Feature 5: Streamlined payment processes
The fifth one is around payments.
And this is one of those things that when you arrive to a hotel, the experience is still very much welcome to the hotel. Can I please have your credit card? I'm going to take a pre authorization of the, the amount of your reservation. And then for incidentals, I'm gonna take an additional fifty euros per night for your stay. And it's this really awkward interaction that you have with a guest who has just walked in the door, and you're basically saying, I don't trust you. I wanna make sure that you've got credits.
We built these workflows in so that we can now take that pre authorization before they get to the hotel. So we can set up a rule that says the day before arrival at three PM, take a charge against take a pre authorization of the room rate plus fifty euros per day automatically. And that makes that check-in so much smoother because you've just cut two minutes off that check-in journey, but you also made it much more warm and and welcoming because you can go straight to the hospitality part of the check-in rather than the payment part.
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Feature 6: Enhanced security with passkeys
The sixth one, is one that we've just recently released, which is, the passkey way to log in to the system. I know that a lot of hoteliers are probably like, that's not really that interesting logging in to the system, But we are seeing elevated cyberattacks against hospitality platforms, and we have to be safe. And and we do see that hotels that are not selecting the most secure way are under a heightened threat for getting phishing attempts against them. What we love what I love about the passkey is that it is, biometric.
So with your fingerprint, with your facial recognition, you log in to the system, and that is the most safe way to log in to the system. It is safer than just having a password and a username because that's the the least safe option. It is also safer than two factor authentication. We've been educated that two factor is the safest way, but, unfortunately, it no longer is because these phishing criminals have got really good at even logging into the system with your two factor authentication token.
So passkey is the next iteration of this. And if you have a smart device like a smartphone, you're golden because you can now log in with your smart device to the to to Mews.
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Feature 7: Early check-in options
Number seven, early check-in fee on the kiosk. We do a lot on the kiosk, but this particular feature I experience a lot when I travel and I travel every single week. It is the experience of walking into a hotel lobby and then saying, hi, I'm here to check-in. And they say, you can come back at three.
You can store your luggage, but your room isn't ready. And I always think, I'm sure that there is a room ready. Like, I can't imagine that out of this big hotel that the room isn't ready and I'm willing to pay for it, but they just don't give me that option. So we deployed a solution on our Mews Kiosk so that when you get to the Mews Kiosk in a hotel and we know that there's a room available somewhere, we will offer it to you at a small price.
So you can set a price saying if it's before ten o'clock in the morning, it's fifty euros or fifty pounds. If it's after ten, it might be twenty euros. So the price is dynamic and it really works incredibly well so that the moment you get to the kiosk, we know that there's a room available. We can swap out the rooms.
We can charge that price. We will take the payment directly on the kiosk, and it's a very smooth end to end experience. And not only does the hotel make more revenue, it also, makes sure that guests can enter their rooms early because I'd be willing to pay for it. The the the biggest focus on this one is making sure that your housekeeping department is also fully trained on the digital app.
So we have a great mobile app for housekeeping where they can inspect the rooms and clean the rooms instantly back into operation. Because if you don't have this natural flow and if your housekeeping only gives the rooms back at two PM, then you get a real workflow problem because you might have your kiosks perfectly configured. You might have your pricing perfectly configured. But unfortunately, the housekeeping doesn't return the rooms, then you can't sell the rooms.
So it is really, really important that you think about housekeeping in this dynamic.
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Feature 8: Dynamic pricing strategies
Number eight, dynamic pricing for everything. We have deployed dynamic pricing a couple of years ago and one of the nice things about dynamic pricing is that in hotels we've been able to price bedrooms dynamically. Meaning every day, the rate changes for different segments and for different customers and different rate types. And that's driven a huge amount of increase in potential revenue for hotels. And this is what's been driving a lot of the gains in the past years. However, it's really, really hard to continue driving gains every single year on if you just focus on the room revenue.
A large part of the revenue comes from ancillary services, from restaurant reservations, from breakfast services, from bicycle rentals, from meeting room rentals, and those have always been statically priced.
A couple of years ago post COVID, we started developing dynamic pricing for everything. So you can now dynamically price the breakfast costs, the bicycles, the parking, and that creates a huge opportunity for potential uplift for the hotel's total revenue.
So dynamic pricing for everything means that if, for example, you know that on a Thursday, your hotel is busier than on a Saturday, It is very likely that your parking is gonna be busier on that Thursday as well because more people will arrive, meaning more people will bring a car. So why don't we increase the pricing for the parking for the Thursday night versus the Saturday night?
And and this is a really exciting development and it does require revenue managers to think beyond just room pricing. But if you do, there's a real potential uplift that you can have.
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Feature 9: Virtual credit card automation
Number nine, virtual credit card recognition and automation. There is nothing more painful than working with OTAs who issue virtual credit cards and most of the OTAs now have really fully committed to working only with virtual credit cards. This benefits them, but unfortunately, it works strongly against the operation of a hotel because these credit cards are often activated on the day of arrival or the day of departure or even at time of creation. And they all have different rules and it's really hard to work with it.
So we spend a lot of time working on recognizing which card it is, when we can activate it and when we can charge it so that we can have a complete end to end automatic workflow for reservations that come in with virtual credit cards. And this solves a major pain point because when you get the guest card, you can use that one card for the accommodation, but you can also use it for ancillary charges, which is not the case with a virtual card. You can only use that for the room rates and then you still have to capture the guest personal card for ancillary charges. So we've deeply thought about these workflows in hotels, which are very, very complex and complicated because of the way that OTAs work with virtual cards.
And we can now help end to end automate most of these workflows, which is increasing a huge lift from, the pain of manual entry.
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Feature 10: Activity reporting insights
The last one, which is an oldie, but it's a Grady, and I still every time I meet with a hotel, this is one of the first reports that I open in Mews because it tells me so much about how digitally savvy they are. And if you remember when I talked in number seven about the early check-in fee on the kiosk, This is one of those features that I, go back to, which is number ten, is the activity report.
On the dashboard, you'll find a report that's the activity report and you can get a twenty four hour day view and you can see exactly when what happens in the hotel. And the report I pull is when rooms are inspected. So I'll run the report for the last three months and say, tell me in which hour of the day, we get bookings back from housekeeping to operations.
And what I always see is that most rooms get inspected between two and three, which is when housekeepers go home. And that's when they go and hand over all of the cleaned rooms. And that tells me that this hotel has not leveraged the housekeeping app on the smartphones and enabled their housekeepers to use it. And then that leads me to a really interesting conversation about how far has a hotel taken their digital journey. So the activity report is usually my first report to go to because it very quickly tells me whether a hotel has fully adopted, our products end to end or whether there's a great conversation to have about automation.
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Bonus feature 1: Guest selfie for recognition
So those are my top ten features in Mews that are somewhat hidden, but can add a real value to your hotel. What are the two bonus features? Because there's two things that are coming up that I get really excited about because I think that they're gonna really make a difference. The first one is that soon during the online check-in, we will ask guests to supply a selfie and they don't have to. They can skip that step. But guests can upload a selfie, of themselves during the online check-in. We then add that photo to the profile in the PMS.
And this is really critical because we want staff to recognize your guests. And they can only do that if we have some some recognizable photo of the guests. And they're the most recognizable if they take a selfie right before they get to the hotel. So we'll be rolling this out very soon. And I think that this is going to be quite a breakthrough kind of experience because now suddenly, we as hoteliers can start to recognize customers and start to really use the AI to then jump into those experiences because the AI tells us something about the customer. The photo tells you who the customer is, and you can now connect the dots to create these next level experiences.
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Bonus feature 2: Revamped accounting ledgers
The second bonus feature for this week's Matt's talk, is it's probably a thing that you're like, that is not exciting. But I will tell you why I think it's exciting. We've completely reworked our Citi, Citi ledgers and accounting ledgers in the past year and a half. It's taken us a huge amount of effort to lift this into a new framework where we now have full end to end reporting that accountants have asked for for a very long time.
The thing that I love about it is that we haven't just built what everyone else has built. We've really thought through some real innovations.
One of those being on the city ledger, we have invoice reminders that we're building out. So one of the most important thing for any hotel is to collect cash, to make sure that we collect the cash for events for outstanding invoices as fast as possible.
And often the invoice is sent one time at the time of departure, but then they just sit there unpaid and reminders don't go out automatically.
And with the new Citi Ledger reports, with our payments integration, we've embedded payment links directly in the invoices, making sure that customers can pay as fast and as seamlessly as possible. And now we'll be deploying reminders as well that you can send out in bulk so that you can really make sure that you collect payments as fast as possible. And this is one of those features on these ledgers that we built that I think is going to be really, really powerful because if there's anything more critical than anything in our industry, it's making sure that we have these great cash flows running.
So those are the twelve features, the ten existing ones and the two that are upcoming. I have so much more, but I wanted to make sure that I consistently talk about our product and talk about the things that I think are really changing the way that people experience Mews Hotels. I hope you enjoyed that. And if you did, then I can do more episodes like this where I continue to highlight some specific features across our products. Thank you.
