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[00:00]: Machines like kiosks, they don't have the level of embarrassment to ask for an upsell. "Would you want to pay €25 to get the benefit of early access to this room?" And I'll tell you that most guests will actually take that benefit because they don't want to wait 6 hours.
[00:25]: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talk. Today, it is just me. I have just returned from a trip to North America, where I stayed at an 800-bedroom Marriott. And you know, I always enjoy going to those large hotels because it really shows how systems work at scale. And I used to work in an 800-room hotel. And about 20 years ago, I was the front office manager. And we often had queues because, you know, with 800 rooms, you get big conventions. And on a busy check-in day, you do 400, 500, 600 check-ins on that day. So, you're going to get these, like, sprints where you've got lots of lots of check-ins.
[00:59]: So, this week, when I checked into this hotel, that's exactly what happened. I arrived, and the queue went, you know, it basically had lines like at an airport, and the queue went out the door. And I was like, "Oh God." And I had to get in the back of the queue, and unfortunately, I had to wait it out. You know, I'm not some fancy loyal member because I stick with Mews hotels mostly. So, once I finally got to the front of that queue, the experience was as painful as you can imagine.
[01:24]: This hotel was running on probably a legacy stack, I'm imagining, with disconnected apps. The first thing that happens is that, "What's her last name?" And I gave her my last name. Well, she couldn't find the booking. She said, "Could it still be different?" I said, "No. It's Willow." She said, "Do you have a confirmation number?" I was like, "Yeah. I do actually have a confirmation number." So, I gave her the confirmation number that my assistant had given me, and she then went over to her colleague. And I heard them talking and said, "Oh, that's a Marsha code. We can't look for that kind of code in our system." Marsha is then legacy, like, legacy of legacy kind of CRS systems.
[01:56]: So, the confirmation code didn't help. Then the supervisor said, "Are you maybe part of a company or a group?" At this point, I'm fully panicking, thinking I have no room. And, you know, as a guest, this is the worst kind of experience that you have. You're like, you were sure your assistant had booked. But at this time, it's too late to call Europe because they'd already gone to bed.
[02:13]: So, they then found that our company had a group block. So, they went through the group block, and then they found me based on my first name. Apparently, they had misloaded all of the group, and we were all under the first name. So, everyone apparently afterwards, I realized that everyone had had the same problem. So, firstly, they couldn't find the booking, and then the process started.
[02:31]: And the check-in was, you know, it was clunky. You know, at some point, I said, "Oh, can I pay by Tap to Pay?" And she's like, "We don't accept Tap to Pay in 2026." So, I had to whip out my credit card. And the last time I touched my credit card was probably the year before, when I checked into an American hotel because everywhere else, I just pay with my iPhone. And it was just this really disjointed experience end-to-end that I thought, "I'll do a Matt Talk episode just about what I would do if I were a front office manager today at an 800-bedroom hotel with the technology stack that is available in the world."
[03:04]: And, you know, I'll talk a lot about what we do at Mews, but I think you could couple this together also from other tech vendors. But, obviously, I'm biased because we're building the thing from the future based on a lot of things that are in the back of my mind from that time when I was a front office manager and the things I would have done if we had access to great technology back, was it 2006? So, let me talk you through what I would do to make sure that we never get queues at our 800-bedroom hotel if I owned an 800-bedroom hotel.
[03:31]: So, let's start at the very beginning of the queue. Usually, what you see in a hotel is that it gets really busy in the afternoon. Between 3 and 6 on a big arrival day is usually when you've got this massive queue. A large portion of those customers in that queue are people that have arrived already early in the day, but they were told to come back. Because when they arrived in the morning at 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM, they were told, "You know, your room isn't ready. Please store your luggage and then come back at 3," which is for sure check-in time.
[04:00]: And it's a really frustrating thing because we're in 2026. There should be a way to prioritize rooms in a different way. And there is, but most hotels just haven't prioritized the way that they do operate in a modern way. So, let's start and go back to housekeeping and make sure that housekeepers are enabled. Because most of the time, the housekeepers on the floor in the morning, most cleaners start at 8:00 AM to start cleaning the bedrooms. They are given a piece of paper where they print their shift, their 14 or 15 rooms that they have to clean that particular day, and they get some basic information. They know which ones are departure rooms and which ones are stay-over rooms, but that's pretty much all they know about these rooms. They don't know if the guests are physically still there. So, that piece of paper goes on their cart, and then they just start knocking on the first door. And this is why often you get knocked on your door while you're still in the room.
[04:48]: So the first thing I would do is I would give them a housekeeping app. With Mews, we've got Flexkeeping, which is an incredible product that is a mobile app that we can give to housekeepers that works on Android and iOS. And suddenly, they get a task list in their hands. And it's prioritized throughout the day; it gets reprioritized. So, if you're focusing on departure rooms first, meaning rooms that you need to turn around for arrivals, you can reprioritize those throughout the day. So, once they've cleaned the room and someone has left in the meantime, the next best room would be the next departure room. It wouldn't just be the next stay-over room, that is, the room next door. Maybe they'll have to cross two doors to get to that particular room. But this flexible prioritization list is really, really critical to success at the front desk.
[05:32]: So, the first thing is to really enable the housekeepers with technology. And the second thing is creating a culture where the housekeepers are aware that, you know, they should turn around departure rooms first. You can incentivize housekeepers to make sure that before 10, you want to get 4 departure rooms back in operation. Because if every housekeeper on the floor returns 4 of their 14 rooms to the day that are all departure rooms, suddenly, you've got an inventory at the front desk that gives you flexibility. So, one, making sure that housekeepers have a mobile app, and two, creating a culture because you do need someone with a commercial mind running your housekeeping department to make sure that they have this partnership with the front desk, and this is not this constant calling because that's an incredible distraction to the housekeepers.
[06:14]: So, now the front desk has an inventory of rooms. So, when a guest does arrive already, which will happen, it happens every day, the response is not, "You are too early, store luggage, come back." The response could be, "Welcome to the hotel. We're actually quite busy, but I've found a room. I've got a room available. It's for an additional charge of €25. Would you want to pay €25 to get the benefit of early access to this room?" And I'll tell you that most guests will actually take that benefit because they don't want to wait 6 hours. They actually would love to get access to the room.
[06:48]: We've deployed this feature on our kiosk over a year ago, and we started seeing incredible results because machines like kiosks don't have the level of embarrassment to ask for an upsell. And we really see that customers are willing to pay for that additional service of checking in early, and it's driving incredible revenue uplift to the hotels. But the other side benefit of the revenue is that your queue is already significantly shorter because of this implementation, getting rooms back in operation, allowing guests to check in early. Suddenly, 25% of your queue has disappeared in the afternoon.
[07:22]: So, that was portion one, which is the early arrivals. And we've made sure that we automated most of those arrivals into the flows, making sure that they never get in that queue once it gets busy. The second part is those customers that actually do need to check in at the reception desk. Often, the check-in takes about 5 minutes because the process is complex, right? So, the first thing is we need to find your booking, then we need to print a registration card. So, you hand over your passport. They print a registration card, which you have to fill in with the missing details. Then they ask for payments, and they have to explain what card is being used for what payments, and then at the end of that, hopefully, at some point, they'll try to do an upsell. It's very rare that I'll be offered an upsell by a human at the reception desk. And the last step is printing a key, a plastic key that you give to the customer, and then you have to tell them something about their facilities.
[08:09]: It's about a 5-minute process, and a large chunk of that is about the payments and the payment cards and receipts and the printing, etc. So, what we did, because we're a cloud-native system, we built an online check-in because actually the database sits in the cloud. So, there's no reason why I have to go to a reception desk and have another human put my data into the system when actually every traveler walks around with a smartphone, and they can open that on any web browser.
[08:34]: So, what we've done is that at the moment your booking hits our system, we will ping the guest saying, "Hey, here's an email. Why don't you check in online? It's going to make your life a lot easier once you get to the hotel." Then, two days before arrival, those customers that haven't actually completed the online check-in still will receive a reminder. And then one day, before arrival, hotels can add an additional service, which is the SMS service, because some people just ignore emails. And we see conversion go up significantly higher once they add the SMS service one day before arrival, because people do look at their messages. And they will respond to those with a sense of urgency.
[09:09]: So now you've had three attempts to get these customers to check in online. And, hopefully, at this point, you've converted 25% to 40% of those customers into the online check-in flow. And we have seen brands that do more than 40%, but it does really take a smart kind of hotelier to do that. What the online check-in does is, first thing is, you know, we've already found your booking. You can update your details directly on your own smartphone. We ask you whether you want breakfast. If we see that you don't have a breakfast product attached, we will offer an upsell of different products, like a breakfast product, for example, or bicycle rental or co-working space.
[09:44]: The second step is to offer an upsell to a nicer category room. We also know that you have nicer rooms available. We offer those at a discount consistently to 100% of customers. So, whilst there's real inconsistency with the humans at the reception desk because people don't like to sell, the system is incredibly consistent. Then we take payments. So, we ask the guests for their payment card details. We secure their payment card as a token through 3D Secure. So, we do it in a secure way with two-factor authentication, making sure that we capture the card and we enable it for multiple transactions. So, once we've captured the card, we can set up all kinds of automation flows, making sure that a human never has to press a button. We just do that automatically based on the rate type and the payment rules that the hotel has set up.
[10:38]: And then the last step is the digital key. So, for some hotels, because you do need to upgrade your hardware to enable it for the digital key. So, for example, if you work with ASSA ABLOY, we have integrated Google and Apple wallets so you can have a complete end-to-end digital experience. So, on the day of arrival, once your room is clean, we'll message the guest saying, "Hey, you're in Room 203. Your room is ready for you. Here's your digital key." And they can then go and open the room without ever passing by the reception desk and forming that queue.
[10:57]: If the hotel has not upgraded their hardware, which is the majority of cases, because it does cost some money, basically, we've outsourced 4 of the 5 steps of the check-in. We've done all the admin. So, by the time they speak to a human, they just have to cut the key. So, that makes a check-in of 5 minutes, maybe 30 seconds to a minute, but it instantly drives a really fast flow of the reception queue, and that's a really important step.
[11:24]: So, the online check-in is a really major thing that I think every hotel needs to deploy, especially if you do a lot of high-turnover business with queues; you should lean into the automation that the online check-in offers. So, the first thing we did was really deal with housekeeping, make sure rooms come back on time. The second thing was the online check-in. The third thing is kiosks.
[11:45]: So, not every hotel loves the idea of kiosks. However, it's incredibly effective, and it does the job really well. And kiosks have improved so much. And especially since COVID, we've seen this wave of businesses using kiosks throughout. If you walk into McDonald's or any fast-food restaurant, you use a kiosk often. At airport shops, you use kiosks. Everywhere, we've accustomed customers to using kiosks. And it works really, really well because customers can check in at their own pace.
[12:13]: But the kiosk is incredibly consistent in the way that it's following through the steps. So, what I would recommend is that if you do, as a hotel, prioritize the human experience, so you actually would prefer customers to check in at the reception desk, you can put kiosks in a different area of the lobby. So, you can put them in a darker or more hidden area of the lobby. So, the moment it gets busy, you just need someone to redirect traffic so you can actually point people towards the kiosk. So, that's one way if you don't love kiosks, to still have them, because I think customers, if given the option to queue for 30 minutes or to just do the check-in on a kiosk, they'd much rather prefer the kiosk. Even though you, as a hotelier, prefer the personal service, people do not want to queue. So, put them in a darker corner, or hidden away corner, and then you have a human redirecting some of the traffic.
[13:03]: However, the most successful concepts have put it right front and center. So, the first thing you see when you walk in is actually a row of kiosks, and you can design this really, really well into your lobby. Because if you give guests an option saying, "Oh, here's a bunch of kiosks and here's a human that is looking at you as you walk through the door," they will naturally walk to the human. Because we're accustomed to this. We've checked into hotels, and we're naturally drawn to the human. However, when you suddenly have the only option, which is the kiosk, because it's a really nice signage, really nicely designed, and maybe there's a human walking around with a tablet that is helping customers with their kiosk, it works really, really well.
[13:40]: And we've seen that hotels that lean into the kiosk make significantly more money on upsells because it's done really, really consistently. The kiosk flow takes care of everything. So, it does actually fill in the profiles. You sign the reg card again. You are offered an upsell for both the products and the room. And then the last step is payment and keys.
[14:02]: If you, however, have done the online check-in that we talked about in step two, those customers get to the kiosk. It instantly finds the last screen, which is basically saying, "Let's cut your key and get you to your room." So, the customers that have actually done the pre-arrivals, and if those hotels haven't invested in digital key, the kiosk is still helping with the queue-busting. Because if you have to get in the back of a long queue that takes 20 to 30 minutes, and even though you've already done the online check-in, it is very frustrating that you now have to wait to just be handed a plastic key. So, again, that's where these kiosks come in in a really smart way. So, lean into the kiosk and then determine how that fits into your lobby concepts.
[14:41]: Another great way to make sure that you serve those guests that are getting in the queue is, you know, making sure that you can extend your team. Because most of the time, you only want receptionists that are fully trained behind the reception desk, because the PMS systems can be complex and it does require some training. So, what we did is we can turn that kiosk screen into a staff mode. So, basically, instead of building it into the infrastructure, in addition to doing that, you can just have a number of iPads lying in the back office that you can just pull out. When it gets busy, you pull out waiters from the reception, you pull out managers on duty, and you just give them the tablets and say, "Just go and check people in." It doesn't require training because it basically says "check-in" or "check-out," two buttons. And it takes you through that flow like it does with the kiosk, but it's human-assisted. So, it's a little bit more personal. And that really ensures that any human can start to bust that queue at the reception desk.
[15:37]: The only thing I would recommend is to build in an RFID encoder somewhere in the lobby, so when they grab those tablets, they have a stack of keys in the back of the tablet into the folder, and they can start to check in customers there and then, and they can get the end-to-end workflow done by the reception.
[15:53]: The other thing you can do with the kiosk tablets is actually put it on the reception desk. So, that's, like, an interesting use case. So, one, you can use the kiosk as a standalone kiosk, like, unmanned, where customers can serve themselves. Two is using it as a crowd-buster. And the third thing is as an extension of the reception desk. So, where most of the time, the receptionist will ask you for passports and start typing your data in or taking it from the registration card, you can actually find the reservation and then push it to the kiosk. So, the guest sees the tablet on the reception desk. So, they can fill in their profile, which is much easier, and the data will be much cleaner if the human who owns the data is typing it in rather than someone else who's typing it in from handwritten notes. And this is the third way that you can use the kiosk as a really smart kind of way to accelerate some of the check-in experience.
[16:43]: So, we talked through all of the things you can do. If you were running an 800-bedroom hotel today, all the technology is available to make sure that you never have to see those ropes like you're at an airport again because you've leaned into the automation. 20 years ago, when I was at the reception desk, I was running a DOS system called Fidelio. Fidelio was great, but there was only one way to operate it, which was the one way. And you had to go through the entire check-in flow, and you take payments on payment terminals. So, the only way to check in a guest was at a reception desk.
[17:13]: Today in the cloud, if a brand has really invested in proper cloud technology that is deeply integrated with all the solutions around it, you can deploy kiosks, crowd-busters, online check-in. You can speed up the check-in that happens at the reception desk. You can work with housekeeping teams that are enabled by technology, and all those things together ensure that the worst part of the arrival at the hotel, which is getting in that queue and standing there for 30 minutes, getting more and more frustrated, is automated and ensures that guests don't have that experience, that at least the parts that we can make efficient are efficient.
[17:48]: And then you deploy humans to create these really, really great experiences at your hotel because that's ultimately what hospitality is about. I hope you enjoy this, and I really hope that some of these big brands kind of get their act together in terms of technology, because it hurts me to see that a large hotel like this is still struggling to get customers in that door. And there really genuinely is no need in 2026. So, hopefully, in a couple of years, I'll be checking into that hotel, and we will have fixed some of their problems. But, you know, time will tell. Thank you so much for joining today.
