Matt Talks Hospitality: Real conversations for innovative hoteliers

Guest data is the most underused asset in most hotels. It sits fragmented across the PMS, the OTA, the spa system and a dozen other touchpoints, and most of it never gets acted on. In this episode, Matt puts the spotlight on three CRM solutions from the Mews Marketplace that are tackling exactly that problem. Hear Daan de Bruijn, co-founder of Bookboost, Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate, and Benjamin Devisme, Senior Problem Solver at Quinta (previously Quicktext), talk about turning data into direct bookings and stronger guest relationships.

When you deploy tech the right way, it makes you more revenue, more money. That's hard to prove, since a hotel changes more than one thing at once. Today we bring the data. Mews ran one of its most rigorous studies, across over 6,000 hotels, isolating one system, Mews RMS. What happens when a hotel deploys it, and switches on autopilot? Richard Smithies, Director of Data, led the study. Conor Winders, VP of Product and Engineering, built the product. They’re here to take you through the tech and the data showing a 13% revenue uplift in hotels using the Mews RMS autopilot pricing feature.

What if the room was the least interesting thing about your hotel? Jim Deters looked at a ski town in Colorado and decided to build something else entirely: a tribe. He is the founder and CEO of Gravity Haus, an adventure lifestyle hotel and membership club with properties across the Rocky Mountain West. Jim's a tech entrepreneur turned accidental hotelier, and someone who gives his general managers stock options, which tells you everything you need to know about how differently he thinks. Jim joins Matt to talk about the membership model, the tech stack, and how he's built something that guests are willing to pay for twice: once for the room, and once to belong.

Have lifestyle hotels gotten worse? Eric Jafari has built hospitality companies from the ground up across Europe, multiple times over. He co-founded Locke, edyn and Birch, led a £1.5bn pan-European development platform, and is now building AENDRE, a platform that acquires, develops and operates wellness and lifestyle hospitality brands. Eric and Matt get into the problem with lifestyle hotels, what it takes to raise capital for something disruptive, and what the next generation of hospitality looks like.

Up until a few years ago, Cole Rubin managed a $19 million residential portfolio of around 200 properties across Airbnb and Booking.com. He lived the midnight guest messages, the missed calls, the inbox chaos. That firsthand pain led him to build Conduit, an AI agent platform for hospitality. Guest requesting a late checkout? An agent checks availability, takes payment and updates the cleaning team, all without a human in the loop. Cole joins Matt to talk late checkouts, AI agents and the future of hotel guest communication.