Tech focus kickoff: Insights from Mews CEO Matt Welle

Plus: Netflix's new culinary experience, Opening a hotel, Reimagining hostels, Wellness revenues & more

Author

Josiah Mackenzie
June 20, 2023

Good morning. With two of the hospitality industry’s biggest technology tradeshows coming up later this month (HITEC and The Hospitality Show), we’re going to focus on technology all of this week and next - how it can empower you to delight your guests and reach your goals. To kick this off, we’re going to be learning from the CEO of Mews today about a framework he calls “User Disengagement.”

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Also: In our survey last week, the significant majority of Hospitality Daily readers wanted me to include just the links to the stories of the day (no writeup), so I’ll do that moving forward, and use the writeup for the feature story of the day. If you feel strongly about this and prefer another format, hit reply and tell me why!

Today, we’re looking at:

FEATURE STORY

"User Disengagement" and Reimagining Technology

with Matt Welle, CEO of Mews, on the Hospitality Daily Podcast

When it comes to hospitality technology, the goal should be to get people off screens as quickly as possible, says Mews CEO Matt Welle. He calls this approach "User Disengagement" and believes it can be transformational for hospitality providers.

"A system should do as much as it possibly can for you. If I can cut 70% of the tasks you need to complete in it, that's the power of User Disengagement at work."

Traditional workflows in hospitality have too often included tedious workflows at check-in and elsewhere, asking for passports and credit cards and the like. "I remember when I was working at Hilton, there was a brand standard that says you must acknowledge guests three times with eye contact during check-in," Matt recalled. While well-intended, these processes ended up feeling artificial and were made tedious by outdated technology.

This experience later led Matt and Richard Valtr to look for technology at another hotel they were working at. Better tech changed their operations - and the way they approached hiring.

"We said, let's hire the people with personality. We'll teach everything else," Matt recalled. "You really get a very different experience when you don't just look for people with experience with legacy technology systems because they will be looking for a system that they can type data into because that's what they've been trained to do. But if you step away and say, no, I want the person that smiles, that is genuinely engaged - suddenly you get a very different perspective."

By using technology to reduce repetitive tasks and free staff up to prioritize connecting with guests, hospitality businesses can create a remarkable experience and stand out from their competitors.

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