When guest requests fix themselves: Inside Mews Guest Messaging and Automations with Adam Britton

[00:00:00] Adam Britton: If there's returning guests at your hotel, they shouldn't need to be part of a loyalty program to be recognized. If I've stayed more than 5 nights and you've got a room in the category above available, give me an upgrade. I would love that. And also then send me a message telling me that you upgraded, and I will never ever forget that.

[00:00:28] Matt Welle: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks Hospitality. And today's talk about hospitality will be about guest messaging and automations. And the gentleman that you see on the other side of the screen is Adam, and he's been here already twice. So, he's a returning guest, and it's because he's got exciting things to announce every single time he comes here. So, I'm really excited to bring him back. We have recently launched guest messaging and automations, and these are not products; they are features. And I think where traditionally they would have been considered separate products, we've now built them natively as an embedded feature to the core platform, the Mews OS. And I think that's really newsworthy on its own. But I really want to dig deep into what are the sub-features of these amazing features that we're releasing to our customers today. Adam, thanks for joining me today.

[00:01:11] Adam Britton: Thanks so much. I'm glad to be back. So, guest messaging - how about we start off with that? Guest messaging: it brings Booking.com chat, Expedia, SMS, WhatsApp and our Mews guest portal chat inside of the property management system. Guest messaging systems have been around for quite some time now, and why we decided to build this natively within the Mews Operating System, it actually came out of frustration because there's one hotel that I stay at all the time in Amsterdam. It's one metro ride away from the office. They don't have ironing boards in the room. And every time I go, I send a message through WhatsApp saying, "Can you put an ironing board into the room?” I get an AI response which isn't personalized, it's very generic, and it says, “Hey, we've escalated this to the team.” And then I get, like, it's crickets. I get no response. And so, I went to the front desk team, and I was like, “Do you guys check these messages that I send you?” And like, “Oh, no, no, we don't have that open.” I was like, “What do you mean you don't have it open?” And she's like, "Oh, I close the tab.” And I was like, “Okay, right. So, you've got a system that your hotel owners are paying a lot of money for each month, but you're not using it because it's on a completely different platform.” Out of sight, out of mind. So, that was the main problem that we wanted to solve is that staff live in the property management system, and anything that is urgent, anything to do with a guest, needs to be in that platform that they're using all the time. So, now, on the dashboard, you click one button, and you see all the guest messages from all those channels.

[00:02:41] Matt Welle: Because it happens natively in the workflow that you're in. Right? So, whereas if you logged into the Mews but you're also logged into other platforms, you might get a ping, but if you're busy, you're going to forget about the ping, and you're going to keep focused on the platform that you're in, which is Mews, because that's the platform we're using to check people in and out. I love that. Is it only reactive, or is it also proactive? Can we reach out to customers proactively with the messaging?

[00:03:02] Adam Britton: Yeah. Proactively as well. And that's where it ties nicely into Mews Automations. So, you should, of course, do the standard: when the reservation's created, send them that thank-you message reminding them to do their online check-in and get their digital key, but you should also do that welcome as soon as they check in, as soon as the reservation checks in, say, “Hey, you're in Room 101. This is how you get to the room.”

[00:03:23] Matt Welle: The question is, how do I get on the WiFi? Right?

[00:03:25] Adam Britton: Yeah. And like, yeah, the WiFi. And for me, it's how to get to the room. Like, you know, I'm in Australia, so I travel 20-plus hours to get to these hotels in Europe, and I'm just in autopilot mode. I'm a zombie. And I need, you know, even when I check in at a desk and I'm told this information, it goes in one ear and out the other. I need to have something I can follow on my phone. Because every hotel is different. Of course, you have the standard easy hotels: up the elevator, turn right. But there are some hotels which are incredibly complicated, multiple lifts; the floors are like mazes. So, that's the standard type of messaging that you should do. But then you should also do some personalization. And you use automations; you can design these agentic triggers so you can say, “Hey, reservation checks in 5 hours after.” Let's see if there's a personalized offer that we should offer to them. So, I'm a business traveler. I'm expected to bring some sort of gift home after I've been away for 2 weeks. So, you know, you can see he's here on business; he travels here frequently. How about we, you know, offer something from our gift shop for him to take home, so then he doesn't need to run around the airport trying to find something. Also, you know, if you are a resort and you have your cabanas and your sunbeds inside of Mews, you can see, “Hey, a guest was on the beach all day; maybe we should send them a personalized offer to have some aloe vera after-sun lotion sent to their room.” All of those offers you load in inside of Mews, and you say, hey, who should you offer to them and when? And then the AI handles everything for you.

[00:04:56] Matt Welle: Because messaging is basically integrations with messaging platforms like email or SMS or WhatsApp. And then automation is this ‘if this, then that’ machine. So, if this thing happens at the hotel, then the follow-up action would be this. So, you can build these workflows, right? But why does it matter that we launch them at the same time?

[00:05:14] Adam Britton: Yeah, because they go hand in hand. Look, a lot of the automations that you're doing are to do with guest engagement, with messaging, with Mews Automations. Where this came from is years and years ago: we launched a connection to Zapier, and we have a large number of hotels that have connected Zapier, n8n, Workato, those IFTTT and those platforms to Mews. And when we're speaking to customers, there's some that, you know, they've got the blessing from their IT team to connect those external tools. But then there's a lot of hotels which have to jump through, you know, hoops. They have to procure a different vendor. They have to then, you know, negotiate a contract with that separate vendor. They're missing out on being able to create all of this custom business logic inside of Mews. So, we said, “Hey, let's make it easy. Let's put it in our platform. There's guardrails in place. There's safety so people can't, you know, make mistakes. We can give them templates that are commonly used.” The other reason why we prioritize this is for that guest experience. So, if there's returning guests at your hotel, they shouldn't need to be part of a loyalty program to be recognized. If I've stayed more than 5 nights and you've got a room in the category above available, give me an upgrade. Like, I would love that. And also then send me a message telling me that you upgraded, and I will never ever forget that. So, there's so many hotels which don't benefit from that.

[00:06:33] Matt Welle: What you're saying is a key point because often you might get the upgrade, but we forget to tell the customer that “Thank you for your loyalty. We have given you a nicer room.” And I think it's just reminding them that we've recognized them for their loyalty and therefore given them the room instead of just moving them to the room without saying anything. And I think that makes the impact.

[00:06:50] Adam Britton: Absolutely. And also, you know, make sure when the guest doesn't get an upgrade, make sure there's a note on the reservation so the staff can say, “Hey, I'm just letting you know we're fully booked tonight. We would have loved to give you an upgrade. We always consider you, as you're such a high-value guest.” When you don't upgrade the guest, it's also important to recognize that too, so they know. So they don't feel like they are being ignored all the time. They know that they will be rewarded.

[00:07:16] Matt Welle: Right. So, you can have a workflow that says, right, if available, give them upgrades to the suites, but if no suites are available, then the follow-up action would be to send champagne to the room or something like that. Because there's a cost element that you might want to consider, but actually you still want to do something nice for the customer, and you can build these multi-threaded workflows based on execution scenarios.

[00:07:36] Adam Britton: Absolutely. And with that offer action inside of Mews Automations, of course, we have loyalty and loyalty tier as one of the qualification criteria. But then there's also returning nights and guest spend, so you can look at the guests through those different lenses to see when you should reward them and perform an action.

[00:07:58] Matt Welle: So, if I can say, if the guest has spent, whatever, €10,000 with us at the hotel, like, you can do something special.

[00:08:04] Adam Britton: Exactly. And that spend also includes their spend from Mews' point of sale. So, maybe they entertained a client and had a really, really expensive dinner inside of the restaurant. If you're using Mews POS, that is always tied to the one guest identity. So, you're not just looking at the spend that's in the PMS; you're looking in the food and beverage outlets as well.

[00:08:25] Matt Welle: Brilliant. Can we go back to your Amsterdam trip and that ironing board? So, like, what would that be like now when you're next checking into that hotel end to end?

[00:08:33] Adam Britton: So, now the AI is just actually going to create that task for housekeeping to put the ironing board in the room. So, there'll actually be someone that is told, "Hey, Adam needs his ironing board.” So, that won't happen. But what would have happened is, if that automation wasn't there, the staff are constantly going to be pinged inside of Mews, and that chat icon's colour is going to change more and more. Inside of Mews, we have a very, very easy colour pattern. Blue is something that needs to be done. Yellow is an action you need to take soon. And then orange is that's really bad; you need to fix it now. So, the longer the guest is waiting, that colour changes. So, the staff are being constantly pinged with, "Hey, you haven't responded to this guest. Get back to them.”

[00:09:16] Matt Welle: Because if I go back to what happened before. So, you requested an ironing board, that message got triggered into some separate platform, and then a human is the router to the different department, right? The human is always the factor. That's like, right, I've got a message with an action for housekeeping. So, I now need to pick up the phone to the housekeeper on that particular floor to actually send the iron to the room. So, we removed the human routing elements, right? So, now we're getting the message. We're recognizing it's an ironing board. We're recognizing that's a housekeeping request. So, we're automatically going into the housekeeping system, which is also a Mews system, to create the task. So, it really turns it into this kind of end-to-end experience. Did I get that correct?

[00:09:56] Adam Britton: That's exactly it. It flows all the way to the Mews Housekeeping Management System. The other thing it can do nicely is orders. So, a lot of, you know, hotels have removed minibars after COVID, and I probably was the only person using the minibar. So, I'm really, really upset about it. But one of the nicest things - like, I love the minibar - like, after a long day at work, like having my Coke Zero and KitKat, like, that was my treat, and now I've been robbed of my treat in many hotels. So, bring it back and give me an on-demand minibar.

[00:10:27] Matt Welle: You're not going to go to the lobby in your pyjamas, right?

[00:10:28] Adam Britton: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So, now you can bring that back. And it's so easy for you to have an on-demand minibar. And inside of Mews, on the dashboard, there's a section called orders. And orders are a product that needs to go through that fulfillment lifecycle. So, I'm talking to the AI agent, and I'm saying, “Hey, can I please have my KitKat and Coke Zero before bed?” And then it's going as a pending order. Staff are seeing that on the dashboard. They're then clicking ‘Confirm’. So, that means, “Hey, we've got it. We're on your order.” And then they're clicking ‘Process’. They've delivered it to the room. So, you can actually have that life cycle of that order being delivered. Very similar to, you know, your Deliveroo, your Uber Eats. So, bring back the minibar. I'm happy for it to be in an on-demand format.

[00:11:13] Matt Welle: One element again, we talk about it in passing, but actually I think it's important is the AI element. So, you know, instead of the human being the router, AI absorbs it. Can you talk about what we're doing with AI in these products?

[00:11:25] Adam Britton: Yeah, absolutely. So, inside of Mews, you have a central property context layer. So, this is everything about your property. And to get started with this, you dump your compendium in there. I'm sure you have that in a Word doc or a PDF at the moment. You can dump that whole long 5,000-character list inside of the system. And then the AI analyzes that and says, “Okay, this…”

[00:11:46] Matt Welle: Sorry, this is like opening times of things.

[00:11:49] Adam Britton: Yeah, opening times. How you get an ironing board and ironing room. That book that usually sits on the bed in the room when you check in, the compendium. So you can take that.

[00:11:57] Matt Welle: The directory.

[00:11:58] Adam Britton: Yeah.

[00:11:59] Matt Welle: I hope that you're enjoying this episode because if you do, make sure that you press that subscribe button. It really helps grow the audience and keep you informed whenever a new episode drops. We have some of the best hoteliers on this platform, and I love asking them the hard questions so that hopefully you can improve your hospitality business as well.

[00:12:16] Adam Britton: Compendium is the hotel word. So, you can dump that.

[00:12:19] Matt Welle: I've never heard this word before.

[00:12:21] Adam Britton: Hey, look, maybe we'll be divided then. People, you can dump that inside of the product, and then Mews will analyze all of those rules, and it will give you a bunch of guidelines. So, it will say, “Hey, here's everything we've extracted. Do you want to save, or do you want to deny?” So, you can go through and click yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And now you've got your knowledge base. Over time, you can keep training that knowledge base off, and it's as simple as just typing in a quick, you know, a quick comment. So, maybe you had a guest inquiry, and they were saying, you know, “What's the best Mexican restaurant here?” And you're like, “Oh, I don't know, but here's some on Google. Let me know how it went.” The guest came back, and they're like, "This place down the road, it was amazing. You should recommend it to everyone.” Usually that knowledge just, like, gets discarded, but now you can just type that into the property context and say, “There's a really good Mexican restaurant down the road at this address.” Then it saves it into that context layer, and then the AI will constantly recommend that.

[00:13:20] Matt Welle: Yeah. The human still has to take the context from the message and then go back into this context layer to add it automatically.

[00:13:26] Adam Britton: Yeah. So, the context layer is being farmed as well. You could also add things in there, but the human always has to say, “Yes. Save or remove.” Before we commit something to that property context, we always just want you to essentially say, “Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no.”

[00:13:40] Matt Welle: Brilliant. Because that actually leads to the question that I think a lot of hoteliers have, like, yeah, yeah, this is all nice for the AI, but I don't want the AI to start recommending things that are wrong, like, where can a hotelier get involved? Because I think there's a lot of hesitation about this autopilot where we just let the hotel run and AI just goes to answer all of your questions.

[00:14:01] Adam Britton: Yeah. For sure. And we're seeing a lot of people hesitate to go full autopilot. And this is still new, so no worries. It's scary. It will be the norm very soon. So, the quicker you get started, you know, the faster you'll be a leader here. Inside of the guest messaging system, when you click up the top, there's a button that says ‘Property AI Guidance’, and that shows you the first setting that says autopilot mode on reply to every conversation with AI. And that's when you see all the guidelines that we've recommended for you. That's where you click ‘Accept, Deny. Accept, Deny.’ You can also add more in there to get started. Like, sure, maybe you don't want to turn AI on for everyone yet, but what you can do is you pretend that you're a hotel guest, start having a conversation, and you can turn AI on for your individual conversation. So, at least start trying with it, playing with it, and what you'll see is you'll be like, oh, this is actually pretty good. I do trust that. I do want to turn this on for everyone. That is my number one advice: play with it yourself if you're unsure.

[00:15:00] Matt Welle: If you have switched it on and AI doesn't know the answer to a question. Does it make something up, or does it hand it over to a human?

[00:15:08] Adam Britton: Hands it over to a human. There is nothing more frustrating than when the AI tries to generate something, and it's incorrect, and people see through that. They're not stupid. So, it hands it over to a human. There's a little flag there, and then the staff are able to respond. That flag will then automatically be removed, or they can remove it manually. As a human, you've responded. You can then hand it back to the AI or keep it off. Up to you.

[00:15:34] Matt Welle: Brilliant. You very briefly mentioned getting started, and I'd actually like to talk about what is it like to set this up. Is this like a one-click setup, or like, do I have to have a PhD to kind of navigate the setup of these products or features? You see, I still say products, but it's features. Sorry.

[00:15:49] Adam Britton: So, guest messaging is available for everyone. You already have guest messaging inside of your guest portal. So, we're just adding more channels for you. We're adding AI. We're adding agentic features such as tasks and order creation. So, where you already were going to respond to guests that sent an inquiry through the Mews guest portal, doing their online check-in or online checkout, same place. Adding channels is very, very easy. So, SMS is the easiest one. You can add a phone number there, a local phone number. So, if you're in the UK, you can have a +44 or in the Netherlands, +31. Then, for WhatsApp, you need to go through the WhatsApp for Business flow. So, that takes a few days for Meta to review. But you can see the status inside there. Booking.com is just a connect button, and it links up. So, adding all the channels is very, very, very, very simple to do. But you've already started with this. You already have guests responding to you through the Mews guest portal. You're just now adding more channels.

[00:16:48] Matt Welle: And then automation. So, I went in to test it myself. I didn't do the e-learning course because I'm not one of those people that goes through e-learning. I actually want to just figure it out myself. I found it to be quite difficult to understand the workflows. How easy or hard is it to set up the first task, and is there an AI tool to support that?

[00:17:05] Adam Britton: There is definitely a learning curve. We have a lot of hotels using very similar tools like Zapier or n8n in Mews already. So, those are experts already. But there is a learning curve to start building your own custom business logic. But it's a lot easier now because you can just talk to the AI and, for example, say, “When guests check in, I would like to send them a welcome message that says, 'Welcome to my hotel. You're in room ---. This is how you get to the room.’” Say that to the AI. It will then draft a workflow. Once you've seen a draft, it's then very easy to go, "Oh, I understand how this works.” And then you can start building it yourself. But to be honest, you're mainly just going to use AI and build those workflows with AI, and if you see something wrong, you just then talk to it and say, “No. Fix that. Fix that. Fix that.” But like once you've built your first automation, you're now a software developer. Congratulations. Build more. That's it.

[00:18:01] Matt Welle: But it's exactly the experience I had. I was like trying to put these boxes together, and then I was like, no, I don't know what to feel. And then I started talking to the AI, and I just described it like I would to ChatGPT when I ask a deep question. And it genuinely built an impressive workflow. And then I switched it on. It just worked. And an SMS started appearing on my phone because of the workflow that I set for an upgrade. And the AI is genuinely good.

[00:18:24] Adam Britton: Like, with any software engineering, once you have figured out how to do a loop, you're then a software engineer. So, anyone listening, that's where you need to aim to get a looping function in there. And then you've graduated, and you're now an automation master.

[00:18:39] Matt Welle: To a room full of hoteliers, how would you explain a loop?

[00:18:43] Adam Britton: So, something that keeps running until the list gets down to zero. So, for example, let's say you have 100 guests arriving; you're going to say for each of those guests, do something until you get down to zero. So, it’ll loop 100 times.

[00:18:57] Matt Welle: So, we've been in testing for a while, right? I think we've got a couple of 100 hotels already in testing with these solutions. What have we learned from that first beta?

[00:19:06] Adam Britton: The first beta was, really, that everything is mainly triggered based on a reservation. So, that was the first thing that we learned. Everything is tied to that reservation lifecycle. So, hotels wanted to do something when a guest checked in, or 5 hours before a guest checked in, or on checkout. So, we had to make that really, really robust and give hotels a lot of triggers to be able to trigger workflows. Messaging is the most commonly used automation, whether it's just sending a simple “Hey, welcome to the hotel”, or one that I really loved was when something booked, they sent a YouTube video of, like, an introduction about “Hey, this is who you've booked. This is who we are.” I thought that was really, really nice. So, messaging is the most common. The second is those guest experience automations: doing the room upgrades, putting an amenity in the room, giving someone a food and beverage allowance to say, “Hey, your first drink is on us. Go spend it in the bar; just charge it back to your room, we'll absorb it.” So, that's really, really nice. And what I love to see is that hotels who never, or still don't, have a loyalty program have all of the benefits that a loyalty program has. The room upgrades, the free amenity, the welcome drink at the bar, which is really, really nice because it allows SMB hotels to compete with the bigger properties in their area.

[00:20:28] Matt Welle: Yeah. I think loyalty is one of those things that keep coming up where even a mid-market group of 10 hotels is like, do we set up a points program? Because that seems to be the only thing that people can think of when you say loyalty. But I think no. I think loyalty can be done in a smaller way, much more impactfully, actually, than saving up points and being able to redeem your blue status and your silver status. I think you can be very thoughtful about it, but hopefully you're thoughtful in your local context and do something really that is memorable because those are the kinds of things that customers will talk about when they leave reviews on the Internet, and those reviews feed into LLMs that drive more bookings to you as a hotel specifically. So, I think these workflows can genuinely make your hotel stand out from the crowd.

[00:21:10] Adam Britton: 100%. And you know, as well, like, do personalize this. And that's the beauty of automations is, you know, you can have that filter and create those different paths. So, if I'm a business traveler, don't put a bottle of wine in the room. I'm not drinking a whole bottle of wine to myself when I'm on a business trip. Maybe a beer or two, like, I would love that.

[00:21:28] Matt Welle: Give me an apple.

[00:21:30] Adam Britton: Yeah. Give you an apple. Absolutely. Or, like, some sort of breakfast on the go, something like that. But if I've booked a leisure stay and I'm with my partner, absolutely, give me a bottle of champagne, like, I would love that. It's so easy to put those personalizations in there. It's as simple as just putting a fork in the automation.

[00:21:50] Matt Welle: So, would you set up automations for individual guests? So, if a guest returns regularly, like, I'm an annoying guest who goes to the gym, so I'm like, I prefer a banana in the morning and some coffee. Like, could you set up workflows for individual guests as well?

[00:22:01] Adam Britton: Absolutely, could. If you have those very, very particular guests that are constantly coming, for sure. Give them their own automation. Absolutely. And whenever I'm testing automations, like, that is my little pro tip to anyone that wants to play with automations and is scared. Put that filter in there that says, “Only do this automation if the email address is adamatMews.com.” So, that is, like, my pro tip if anyone is playing around and is scared. You won't make any mistakes if you put that in there to test with. And it's the same thing, you know, “Only put pink apples in the room if the email is mattatMews.com.” But you know, generally, you would use segments, you would use loyalty tiers, you would use returning count and those things to trigger those personalized automations. Nationality is a great one.

[00:22:47] Matt Welle: I know when we start beta testing, we always go into the data because it's fascinating to see how actual humans use systems that, like, they always use them differently than you design a system. Was there something that surprised you in the way that a hotel was using it? Like, a surprise automation that you're like, that's crazy, but I love it.

[00:23:03] Adam Britton: The biggest surprise for me was that introduction video. Like, I've never seen that before. Like, I've never seen this. Like, “Hey, this is what you've booked. Like, this is what you're getting into.” Like, I thought that was really cool. I've never seen that before. So, that was my biggest surprise.

[00:23:19] Matt Welle: It's so affordable to record a video from the GM saying, “Hey, we're excited to get you here.” You immediately put a face to the brand if you send out a video like that. And I use video content for everything. I send videos to people across the company. It's just so much more human. And I think in a hospitality background, like, I think this is such a simple way to just set up an automation.

[00:23:39] Adam Britton: The thing for me, which, like, I've used, you know, Zapier and those tools for a very, very long time. So, they're just so natural to me. And you know, when we're building automations, that was the thing that I forgot: not everyone, you know, has had the same history with those tools as me. So, like, we had to really go back to the beginning and make sure that you could build automations using AI in there and make it really, really simple for hotels to get started. So, those were the biggest surprises for me, for sure.

[00:24:10] Matt Welle: Love that. So, looking forward, like, you keep building; you are always reappearing here on Matt Talks Hospitality to talk about new things. What are things you're allowed to talk about that you're working on?

[00:24:21] Adam Britton: A few things. So, last time we spoke, I think we were talking about the updates that we did to Mews Kiosk and Mews Digital Key. So, that work continues. But the biggest thing for Mews Kiosk is that what we're hearing is people want the functionality of Mews Kiosk, but they don't want to go all in on self-service yet. Fair enough, no problem. So, what we have been working on is resizing the Mews Kiosk to work on payment terminals. The Mews payment terminals that we ship to every single hotel around the world is allowing you to run the Mews Kiosk application on the Mews payment terminal. So, maybe you don't want to have a full self-service check-in, but you want to be able to have the guests enter their registration card details or be presented with, you know, a breakfast upgrade offer or a room upgrade on a device, because it's a lot, you know, people are visual, right? You want to see, “Hey, you're offering me a room upgrade for €100. What does that room look like compared to what I booked?” So, yeah, we want to be able to give that visual element for you to easily say, “This is what you have.”

[00:25:28] Matt Welle: I went to Japan recently, and then they tried to do the upsell, and I was like, I was so impressed that they tried because I've been staying in hotels for so long and it's very rare that someone is trying to do an upsell for me. But, like he said, an amount in a currency that I didn't know; I had no visual of the room, and I was like, is this per night? Is this for the whole stay? I was so confused that I said, “No. No, thank you, it's all good.” And I think visualizing that in a workflow on a screen is going to be super helpful and hopefully contribute significantly more upsells.

[00:25:57] Adam Britton: That's the leak. For anyone that's listening, that's coming soon, and if you are interested in trying that out, feel free to drop me an email@adam@mews.com or write in the Mews community. We'll be ready to start enabling that for hotels very soon. So, if you write to me, you can be one of the first to try that out.

[00:26:16] Matt Welle: Thank you very much. Like, I always enjoy it when you show up because it means we've got really exciting updates. So, next time you see Adam on this show, you know it's going to be something good. I hope you all enjoy automations and messaging. We've been playing around with this for months. It's such a great feature to the Mews Operating System, and hopefully, you'll be messaging me soon when I check into your hotel anywhere in the world.

[00:26:38] Adam Britton: Absolutely. Thanks, everyone.