Ex-lawyer turned founder on reimagining hotel direct booking engine ft. Frédéric Robles of Namastay

[00:00:00] Frédéric Robles: Why, when you buy online in the retail world, you can basically pay in one click with Apple Pay, Google Pay? And why is this not available widely in hospitality? There are many reasons for that, but one of them is that the flow of payments in hospitality is very complicated. It's not something that you pay and then you consume.

[00:00:29] Matt Welle: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks hospitality. Today we have a guest called Frédéric Robles. He's the CEO and cofounder of Namaste, and he's not your typical hospitality founder. He spent over a decade as a tech and antitrust lawyer. He worked at Sullivan & Cromwell and at Amazon before he walked away from all of that in 2021 to start Namaste. The idea is to make direct hotel bookings and payments as easy as possible. Namaste is now live in close to 400 hotels across 42 countries, working with names like Relais & Châteaux, Preferred Hotels and Resorts, and plugged into platforms like Mews as well. That's exactly the reason why I invited him to talk to us, because they've done an integration that others have not yet gone as far with on the booking engine side. I think it's actually really interesting what you've done in terms of the payment integration. But I actually want to go back to the beginnings, because I looked at your history of what you studied, what you worked at. You have no hospitality experience. So how did you end up in this industry?

[00:01:31] Frédéric Robles: Actually, there is a part that's not on LinkedIn or on my CV, which is linked to hospitality, and it starts with my family. My grandparents had a hotel in the South of France, in Lodève, a small city near Montpellier. I used to spend a lot of summers there, so that's where I had my first experience with how to sort of operate a hotel. They had a restaurant. It was open 24/7, obviously, and that's something I always had in my mind. It was very close to my family. Also, when I was a student in law school, I was working in restaurants and hotels to make a bit of a living on the side. So that's something I always had in the back of my mind as an industry that I liked and would like to do something with at some point.

[00:02:14] Matt Welle: But were you working in the hotel at the reception desk, or in F&B?

[00:02:18] Frédéric Robles: No, I was more on the floor, more F&B. Really taking orders, being a waiter in bars, restaurants, and also the beach club on the beach, which is quite popular in the South of France, where I'm originally from.

[00:02:37] Matt Welle: So then you became a lawyer, and were you just really bad at being a lawyer and you needed to escape?

[00:02:42] Frédéric Robles: I was in really good law firms, and I was very exposed to tech. I worked for companies like Uber when they started in Paris, which was a very heated case against taxis. I saw the disruption through technology of an old established market. I was doing competition law, so the angle was always to do with competition and antitrust rules. The story of disruption through technology was something I always really liked. I started first in France, then in the UK, then at Amazon — I was at AWS, the cloud division. I also saw what was happening with cloud technology, which was still quite nascent at the time. It was fascinating to see a company growing that fast, even though it was already doing $57 billion but still growing 20% every year. At some point, my cofounder Romeo came to me. He operates hotels — actually one of the hotels I'm in right now — and he was frustrated about the payments and booking experience on his websites. That's how everything started. He said, "I know you like tech. I know you like hospitality. You probably want to do something with that at some point." The stars aligned. That was four years ago. Stopping a long legal career of more than 10 years to launch something completely new was quite a difficult decision, but probably the best move I ever made.

[00:04:31] Matt Welle: How were the first months? Because I remember when I left my corporate career, those first months were just like, am I cut out for this? I don't even know what's expected of me.

[00:04:40] Frédéric Robles: Sleepless nights. Am I doing the right thing? Am I going to regret this? But at the same time, I knew I wanted to — there was no way back. I wanted to really give it a try and not regret not doing it in 20 years, so I went for it. The first months, especially when we were fundraising, we just had a deck. We just had an idea. We had nothing, and I had no hospitality or tech experience. It was entirely new, so I was very humble at the start, trying to see how this could work, and it turned out, so far, okay.

[00:05:13] Matt Welle: And the first hotel — when you went live, was it immediately perfect, or did you have to go through a few iterations?

[00:05:25] Frédéric Robles: Quite a few iterations. I think we made a mistake that a lot of tech companies make. We built the product a little bit on our own. We were shy to show it. We wanted it to be perfect before showing it to the customer, and I think we should have iterated a lot earlier — it would have saved us quite a lot of time. You want to get feedback from the customer as soon as you can. The launch was delayed. We launched the product pretty much six months after starting the company, which is pretty good, but we had some back and forth. The problem is it's such a core part of the tech stack. Direct booking on the website has to work perfectly. If there is a problem, the hotel loses money instantly. The guest might go somewhere else or to an OTA. It needs to be extremely stable. That's why we've put in place a lot of QA processes. But yes, we needed a lot of iterations — launching an MVP is not easy.

[00:06:30] Matt Welle: And did you have patient customers in the beginning?

[00:06:33] Frédéric Robles: Yes. Our very first group knew they were a pilot. They were extremely collaborative. They knew they could give us a lot of feedback that we would take into account. We had the ability to be super agile at the beginning, so we designed the product a little bit for them. It was very custom to their needs. But I think we still do that with new customers on different features and feature requests. They were extremely patient with us. And they're still here.

[00:07:07] Matt Welle: When Mews started and we said we were going to build a PMS, everyone said there are so many PMSs out there. The booking engine space might be even more crowded. Every channel manager has a booking engine. Every PMS has a booking engine. Then there are booking engine companies. So what was it that you felt was missing from that space?

[00:07:33] Frédéric Robles: The original pain point was very simple: digital wallets. Why, when you buy online in the retail world or order a car with Uber or food with Deliveroo, can you pay in one click with Apple Pay or Google Pay — and why is this not available widely in hospitality? The flow of payments in hospitality is very complicated. It's not something where you pay and then you consume. Usually you make a reservation, you arrive at check-in, you've given your credit card details twice. They ask for your credit card again at check-in for a pre-authorisation, and then at the end you may be asked a third time. That friction in the payment flow is one of the reasons why it's difficult. That was really the missing piece: a digital wallet.

The second thing is redirection. Very often in a booking engine, you have a beautiful website that sometimes costs a fortune for a hotel, you click on book now, and you're in a different environment with a different URL. The idea was to make it seamless, remove all friction, make it as fast as possible, and make it a natural extension of the hotel's website. The website is the face of the shop — usually the first experience a guest has with the hotel. If that's not good or not on par with the hotel experience, there can be a very jarring disconnect.

[00:09:13] Matt Welle: How much customisation can a hotel do? Especially in the luxury segment, hoteliers usually want customisation to the look and feel of their website.

[00:09:25] Frédéric Robles: Yes, we do adapt to that. Some customers ask for a custom font, which sounds easy but from a design perspective is actually very difficult. We manage that. Same for colours, logo, theme, pictures — everything comes in. Our product and design team are absolutely amazing for that. We really try to make it a natural extension of the hotel.

[00:09:53] Matt Welle: You said fonts are not easy — can you explain why, for a non-technical hotelier?

[00:10:01] Frédéric Robles: Depending on the font, language can also be an issue — for example, Arabic goes in the other direction, which from a design and UX perspective can potentially disrupt what you want to achieve. The width of a font means things won't appear the same way if they're not standard. When we have a custom font request, we always check whether it actually makes the design work and whether adjustments are needed for things like buttons — the text can sometimes be very long. For example, when we translate into German, certain words are long and can have an impact. We try to adapt, and we have quite some flexibility, but we always aim for the best possible experience. We are really experience-obsessed when it comes to design.

[00:11:03] Matt Welle: It's just like the width — sometimes letters are flatter and wider, and then text pushes out of the button, or goes over the top or bottom. A 12-point size doesn't mean the same thing for every font type.

[00:11:18] Frédéric Robles: We always try to do it with some form of harmony — sometimes it's a discussion with our designer — but we always try to find a way that makes the hotel happy. For them, it's a very important thing. They love customisation and living with their brand.

[00:11:34] Matt Welle: One thing we found — though I don't know if it's still the case — is that custom fonts take longer to load than a standard font available on the internet. Have you found problems with that?

[00:11:45] Frédéric Robles: No, we don't have issues with latency or loading on that, but we do thorough testing before agreeing to change a font. We always try to remove all the work for the hotel — there's no back office or anything like that. We do the configuration on our end and discuss how things look to make sure it's completely optimised. Same for descriptions and choices — we found that when you have more than 3, 4, or 5 rates, you lose the guest. There's too much choice. Three to four is a good sweet spot. Beyond that, and it's the same for text, if there's too much scrolling, people usually don't really read.

[00:12:31] Matt Welle: And how do you deal with translations?

[00:12:32] Frédéric Robles: We can automate a lot of that. We're still a small team of 20 people, but we have different nationalities. We run checks on translations we can speak ourselves, and automate the rest. Sometimes we also take it from whatever comes from the PMS — if the PMS or CRS already supports the languages, that's where the source comes from.

[00:12:58] Matt Welle: You started with payments, but that's the checkout process. So when you get to that last page, what is unique about the way you deal with payments versus what another booking engine does?

[00:13:08] Frédéric Robles: The thing we're still probably one of the only ones doing is truly bringing express checkout to the hotel — not having to enter any information. You can do it especially on mobile, where you pay with Apple Pay. It's not only going to give you the ability to pay, but also send all the personal information of the guest: first name, last name, email address, phone number, and sometimes even the address. All of that in basically one step.

[00:13:43] Matt Welle: It's like when you buy on TikTok. You see an ad, Apple Pay pops up, you press the button twice, it has all your address details, and it's ordered within one click.

[00:13:54] Frédéric Robles: Exactly. You have your delivery address and everything is already there. You don't need to enter anything. That's really where the magic happens. It sounds easy, but it's actually really difficult. Most booking engines, even when they offer wallets or alternative methods, usually require you to enter some form of information, create a guest profile, or enter physical information. That's the last step of friction we're trying to remove. We also found interesting data: when someone triggers a payment with Apple Pay, they're far more likely to go through the entire process and confirm the payment than if they start entering credit card information. You really want to increase that conversion and also give a sense of safety to the guest — Apple Pay feels very safe versus entering your credit card information on a website you don't know.

[00:14:50] Matt Welle: Yeah — typing in a 16-digit number on some website you don't recognise.

[00:14:54] Frédéric Robles: One of the things we enable is online payments, which we do very well with Mews Payments, but we still have hotels today in 2026 asking for a credit card number over the phone, by email, or even keeping those written down somewhere.

[00:15:12] Matt Welle: And why is that bad? I know why it's bad, but explain it for hoteliers who may not.

[00:15:17] Frédéric Robles: As a former lawyer, I was very surprised at how some hotels are noncompliant with European regulations, especially around payments. I think a lot of it comes from habits — it's been ingrained in this industry. You're not supposed to hold credit card information in clear when the cardholder is not present.

[00:15:48] Matt Welle: In English it's called MOTO — mail order, telephone order. Our industry is one of the last still doing MOTO transactions, where you get unencrypted credit card numbers that you type into a terminal. The fees on those transactions are significantly higher than a card-present or 3D Secure transaction, where two-factor authentication — for example a biometric — verifies the cardholder. The chargeback rate also goes up, because if you get a chargeback on a MOTO transaction, it's very unlikely you'll win it. You've just transacted a random number on a payment terminal. No one can prove the card was actually present — you could have bought a stolen archive of card numbers.

[00:16:31] Frédéric Robles: Exactly. It's crazy to still see that. Cost is a big issue — that's often why hotels do it. But it's shifting, partly because some countries are now auditing hotels on credit card information. Your credit card is the most sensitive personal information someone has. You have GDPR covering personal data like name, phone number, and contact details, but credit card information should be the most protected thing of all. And yet in 2026, there are still five-star luxury properties in Paris with credit card numbers on a post-it note. It's crazy.

[00:17:21] Matt Welle: So you integrate with Mews on the payment SDK as well. Most booking engines just integrate rates and availability and then send credit card numbers through to us. But you actually went a step further and embedded Mews Payments directly into your booking flow.

[00:17:37] Frédéric Robles: Correct. I think we were the first third-party booking engine to do this integration, and also the first to enable Apple Pay for Mews hotels. That's a very exciting step. We also have further improvements in the works to enable the full express checkout — the direct one-click.

[00:18:03] Matt Welle: That's why I'm excited about it. With other booking engines or channel managers, they just send us the card numbers, and it works, but those aren't 3D Secure transactions — we have to process them as MOTO. What you do is take the payment, 3D Secure it via Mews Payments, and then we can use that card for check-in and checkout. At no point in the check-in or checkout journey do we need to ask the guest about that card again. If you think about a check-in experience, a lot of those 5 minutes is just payments — printing receipts, passing a card back and forth. Because you've taken the booking securely, we can now process those follow-up 3D Secure transactions at the hotel. That makes the guest journey significantly easier.

[00:18:52] Frédéric Robles: Exactly. You remove the friction entirely when it comes to payment. You do your Apple Pay once, and you never have to do it again. That's the ultimate experience.

[00:19:01] Matt Welle: I imagine conversion is pretty strong. Can you share anything about how it's converting?

[00:19:11] Frédéric Robles: Yes. We're a small piece of the entire system, so everything needs to be perfect — the hotel needs to be nice, the pricing strategy needs to be good, ideally with direct pricing that's better than OTAs. What we've seen that's very interesting is mobile conversion. That's really where we usually have the highest impact. Most hotel websites get the majority of their traffic on mobile, but conversion is always higher on desktop. We were able to shift that conversion significantly towards mobile. We have hotels that have more than doubled their mobile bookings — some up to 50% of bookings on mobile versus desktop, which is huge. A lot of it depends on the hotel and guest profile. When there are a lot of US customers, they use Apple Pay far more than in other countries, and we know conversion is going to jump massively. We see up to 2.5x on mobile in terms of bookings, and about half of those are with Apple Pay. Another interesting finding: people tend to spend more money with Apple Pay, perhaps because there's less time to reconsider, or perhaps because Apple device owners tend to have more disposable income. Conversion and acceptance rates are higher, but they do depend on the hotel and what they have to offer.

[00:21:11] Matt Welle: One challenge I always have with hotel booking engines is that if I book 2 or 3 rooms, I have to go through the entire process 3 times. Do you support multi-room booking flows?

[00:21:22] Frédéric Robles: Yes. It was actually in our MVP — a requirement from the very first hotel we deployed, Le Pigalle in Paris. It's actually a very difficult feature to build because you can't have one reservation number for multiple rooms. You end up with multiple reservations in one single flow, but with one payment at the end. You can select how many rooms you want, how many people per room, whether there are kids — all of that complexity we can handle. You choose your first room, then your second, then your third, and then you pay at the end.

[00:22:05] Matt Welle: And multi-property, I saw on your website that you support that as well?

[00:22:09] Frédéric Robles: We just launched a new version. It's very important for strong brands and groups with different properties, sometimes in the same city. If one property is full, they want to suggest a sister property nearby that has availability. Cross-property upsell is something we support, and now we have it with a map so you can see where the hotels are located. It stays on the hotel's website — it's a really great experience.

[00:22:45] Matt Welle: On the calendar I can see the rates, which is always helpful because I don't always know which dates I want. We haven't deployed this on the Mews booking engine yet, but lots of customers have asked for it — they want to see what rates are available on each date without having to go into step two and then come back to step one to try different dates.

[00:23:07] Frédéric Robles: Yes, we do support it. Some hotels don't like to show their rates publicly, so we can turn it off — certain luxury properties prefer not to show rates upfront and want guests to go through the process first. But yes, we do show the lowest rate for each day systematically.

[00:23:26] Matt Welle: One of the big challenges we've talked about for many years is how to get more direct bookings versus OTAs. We see in our data that it's between 5% and 15% that a hotel gets direct, and it's very hard to go over that. Do you think it's possible to go over 15%, and what would you recommend hotels do?

[00:23:52] Frédéric Robles: Yes, it is possible, and I think that's the direction we're heading. Hotels are a bit like other industries. When you used to book a flight 20 years ago, you'd go to an agency or a physical store, or call the airline. Those days are gone. Most people now book online, often directly on the airline's website. I think hospitality is going in the same direction. I'm still surprised that only around 20–25% of bookings are made directly on a hotel's website. It's clearly changing. The website is super important. Distribution visibility is critical — everything around metasearch and AI optimisation to make sure your website shows up in search. General marketing visibility is extremely important. But then you also need a great booking experience, including payments. Some of the blockers we see are that people don't feel safe on some hotel websites — you get kicked out to a different booking environment, it doesn't feel secure, you have to hand over your credit card details. Improving this makes a real difference. We have some hotels now with a majority of direct bookings, and some famous brands aren't even on OTAs because they don't need to be.

[00:25:35] Matt Welle: When I go into one of your customers' websites and click 'book now,' does it open a new URL or does it stay within the hotel's website?

[00:25:47] Frédéric Robles: It stays on the website. It's an iframe, so there is no redirection whatsoever. It's also great for tracking because you keep the guest on the same page and can really see their behaviour. It's also better for cookies — you only need to accept them once rather than on multiple pages. It makes everything more elegant, very fluid, very fast.

[00:26:16] Matt Welle: It helps SEO too. If you press 'book now' on a hotel website and it opens a different site entirely, you're basically telling Google that customers aren't interested in this page — they're leaving very fast to someone else's website. Embedding the booking engine inside your website means customers spend more time on it, and Google reads that as genuine engagement.

[00:26:42] Frédéric Robles: Very true. We've also been able to improve the way we track conversion, and it's very valuable for the hotel to see where customers actually drop. Sometimes it's not at the payment stage — sometimes we see people dropping much earlier in the funnel because there are too many choices or the descriptions are too long. Being able to give that feedback to the hotel is also super important.

[00:27:15] Matt Welle: How is AI impacting your business? What are you planning to do with it?

[00:27:26] Frédéric Robles: The best angle for us is on distribution. We're in discussion with companies creating what I think will be the equivalent of metasearch for AI — we enable and increase the visibility of hotel websites on AI platforms. Today, most booking engines sit on the hotel's website, and you need to be on that website to make a direct booking. One of the things we want to build is a booking layer that lives not on the website but directly in an AI chatbot or on Google Maps. Today you can book a restaurant directly in Google Maps via OpenTable or SevenRooms with no redirection — but if you want to book a hotel, you always get redirected to a website. Removing that friction and enabling bookings natively in one of these platforms would be a great step forward. On AI generally, the development team's output has increased enormously with these tools. We were fast before; now we're even faster, which is super exciting.

[00:28:56] Matt Welle: You mentioned metasearch. Can you explain what it is for a non-technical hotelier?

[00:29:10] Frédéric Robles: It's really about enabling visibility of direct hotel websites on different platforms. It starts with Google — Google free hotel booking links — making sure the official website is referenced there and pops up at the top of search results. You have different ways to do this. Some are described as free but aren't really free, while others are paid advertisements to make sure the website appears at the top when someone searches. That can extend to platforms like Trivago or Tripadvisor. The goal is to increase visibility for the hotel. Ideally, you have it connected with your booking engine and website to make the experience seamless, and it's a great price comparison tool — giving guests transparency and ideally showing them they'll get a better price booking direct.

[00:30:19] Matt Welle: One of the challenges I always find is that hoteliers spend a couple of hundred euros on metasearch and then have a Booking.com invoice for €40,000. How should hoteliers think about budgeting for it?

[00:30:34] Frédéric Robles: The lack of investment on this front is major for most hotels, but it is shifting. Hotels are more aware now and have realised — and that was part of our original idea — that you need to bring the hotel onto the same playing field as OTAs, with an experience at least as good as an OTA. It's frustrating to see Booking.com enabling all these different payment methods, and then you go on the hotel's website and the only option is to type in a 16-digit card number.

[00:31:14] Matt Welle: With Booking.com you pay commission afterwards — the booking comes and then you pay — so there's little upfront risk. With metasearch you're paying upfront to drive traffic, and that needs to convert. That's where the wariness comes from. But it genuinely does work. If 50% of your bookings are from Booking.com and you're paying 18% commission, you already know what it costs to drive that traffic — because Booking.com is probably spending 12–15% of that on traffic generation themselves. That is the budget you need to put behind your own website. You have to be academic about it: how much did you spend, did it work, what didn't work, then iterate every single month.

[00:32:06] Frédéric Robles: And also be patient — building that online reputation and reference takes time. But every single property that invests in this will get results out of it eventually.

[00:32:20] Matt Welle: So what's on the agenda for the coming year in terms of feature development?

[00:32:26] Frédéric Robles: Many things in the pipeline. On payments, we've recently launched buy now, pay later — for example, with a French company called Alma, the French equivalent of Klarna, giving guests the ability to pay in instalments. We actually saw a few properties increase revenue thanks to that — people would take a better room if they knew they could split the payments, which is quite interesting. We were the first to enable Alma for hotels in France, which is very exciting. The new multi-property experience is also a big piece of work. But one of the things I'm most excited about is enabling restaurant and spa reservations directly within the booking flow. We have properties with Michelin-starred restaurants where guests want to book a table when they book their room. Today that's not possible — you have to make separate bookings or leave a comment. What we're going to do is enable restaurant reservations through API directly within our booking flow.

[00:33:55] Matt Welle: Are you integrating with Zenchef for that?

[00:33:56] Frédéric Robles: Exactly. We're in active discussions with Zenchef — we have a lot of common customers, we're both French companies, and we address very similar clients. The idea is to have it as an add-on: "Would you like to book a table during your stay?" And to do that automatically without any friction. The priority is always to convert the hotel room booking first. We can have it as one of the steps in the process — you can skip it or continue — but we could also offer it after the booking is confirmed as a post-booking add-on.

[00:34:28] Matt Welle: Will it affect conversion if you ask before capturing the initial booking?

[00:34:28] Frédéric Robles: There's only one way to know — give it a try. The idea is to make it super seamless and not disrupt the flow.

[00:34:59] Matt Welle: Great. So if a Mews customer is interested in switching on the Namaste booking engine, how do they go about that?

[00:35:06] Frédéric Robles: They can contact us very quickly. We're on the Mews Marketplace, which is usually the starting point. It's actually the fastest and easiest way to implement Namaste versus any other platform we've integrated with — the hotel can almost do it themselves. Requesting access gives us access to their inventory and all the information we need. Then it's essentially a script we run on the website. It really shouldn't take the hotel more than 40 minutes in total. We do two calls: a kickoff call to collect all the information — fonts, colours, themes — and then once the widget is set up, a test call where we run a few test bookings to make sure everything looks perfect. Then you flip a switch on the website and you're good to go.

[00:36:03] Matt Welle: Congrats on the amazing business. I love the partnership. I love that you took the traditional booking engine a lot further, and I'm sure that has great conversion results. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing all of your insights.

[00:36:17] Frédéric Robles: Thanks, Matt. Thank you so much for having me. Speak soon.