Ask The Experts #1 – Customer Journey with Chris from Mews

Hi, we’re here with Chris from Mews today. And we’d like to ask you, if you were the owner of a 20-bedroom hotel, what technologies would your recommend investing in? 

It’s a deep question with a very simple answer. You have to come up with what you want to do, and who you want to cater to, and from there we chop up the different types of software you should be using. 

So you have to have a nervous system of all the operations you’re doing, which, essentially, should be a PMS. 

Your PMS should be connected to all sorts of technology that you first have to come up with why you want to use them. So when we go through the guest experience and journey, you need to have a website with a booking engine that is connected to a PMS. 

Prices will be set by a revenue management system based on your needs. So every hotel, hostel or apartment group has different needs in pricing, you choose a proper revenue management system that fits your specific needs. 

Before a guest arrives, you want to have some communications with them right? So you want to send your pre-stay emails, your upsell emails; it’s very important and we are seeing that almost no one is doing that. 

If you don’t, you don’t capitalise on extra revenue, which is nice. But you especially don’t show the guest that you’re interested in them. How do you know who’s interested in what? That’s something you can feed from a CRM. 

These are all aspects that have to do with the booking process. In-stay? Have a nice kiosk to check your people in, have some additional software in the room, like a tablet you can do the lights and music with. And then have a look at how you want to engage your guests with their stay. It can either be on their mobile phone, or on the tablet in their room, or nothing at all and you just engage in a human way. 

But you need to be prepared, and the most important thing is you really need to think about, ‘who do I want to cater to,’ ‘how do I want to cater to them’ and ‘how do I myself want to be treated as a guest’? When you know that, you’ll find the right tech stack or you can just consult with us.