Matt Talks Hospitality: Real conversations for innovative hoteliers

Can your staff keep up with guest messages and requests? Most hotels would say no. Messages scatter across five or six apps, and by the time someone replies, the guest has moved on. Guest Messaging and Automations, two new AI-powered Mews features, intend to fix that. Adam Britton, Director of Product and Engineering at Mews, joins Matt to explain how.

Digital room keys are increasingly replacing the classic physical keycard, with more hotels handing guests a key that lives in their phone wallet instead of a piece of plastic at the desk. Mews and Vingcard, an ASSA ABLOY company, are part of that shift, having launched a partnership to offer native wallet-based room access. Tess Mattisson, Vice President and Head of Product for Hospitality at ASSA ABLOY, joins Matt to talk about the partnership, the tech behind wallet-based keys and the future of hotel locks.

Every hospitality startup pitches a similar story: better tech, faster growth, bigger returns. Someone has to decide which ones are worth the check. On this episode, Matt is joined by Chris Hemmeter, Managing Partner at Thayer Investment Partners. They talk about how venture capital finds and funds the future of hospitality tech: what convinces investors, what makes a business worth the investment risk, and where the smart money thinks this industry goes next.

Wellness is one of the fastest-growing categories in hospitality, and for a lot of properties it has moved from a nice-to-have into a real part of how the business makes money. Steve Porter, Co-founder of Trybe, has spent years building software for exactly that part of the hotel. Steve and Matt talk about why guests now book the spa before the room, what makes it the most complex system in a hotel to run and how wellness is redefining hospitality.

Every hotel used to fight for a guest's attention on Google. Now guests are asking ChatGPT where to stay, what to book, even what to buy once they get to the room. That shift changes hospitality. Gilad Berenstein founded Utrip, the world's first AI travel company, which helped 225 million travelers plan trips before it sold. He now runs Brook Bay Capital, investing in AI across travel and hospitality. Gilad joins Matt to talk about the AI use cases property owners can already try as agentic AI takes hold.