Matt Talks Hospitality: Real conversations for innovative hoteliers

Why can you order an Uber within seconds but booking a hotel room still feels like filing a tax return? That is the question Frédéric Robles could not let go of. A tech and antitrust lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell and Amazon, he walked away from law in 2021 to build Namastay, a modern booking engine now live in over 400 hotels across 42 countries. He joins Matt to talk about why most hotels are stuck below 15 percent of direct bookings, and how payment optimization, including digital wallets like Apple Pay, can shift that number.

Hotel gyms. A dead space or a great investment? Matt talks to two experts with opposing views to settle the debate. Lou Zameryka, Global Head of Hotel Enterprise and Connectivity Partnerships at Airbnb, has worked at Booking.com for 17 years and has spent his career at the intersection of travel and wellness. He says hotels are sitting on an opportunity they can't see. Borivoj Vokrinek is Strategic Advisory & Head of Hospitality Research at Cushman & Wakefield, and has advised on hundreds of hotel investment projects across three continents. He sees hotel gyms as wasted real estate and a cost that rarely pays off. Tune in.

Recorded live at Mews Unfold in Amsterdam, this bonus episode brings Matt on stage with three hoteliers who've each rethought what a property is supposed to be like. Stijn Soolsma from Aedes, Josef Vollmayr from Limehome and Mirco Weber from AMANO Group talk through the operational decisions that come with breaking the standard model, what it takes to build a team that believes in a concept before it is proven, and how guests respond when you get it right.

A third of hotel guest messages go unanswered. Reconciling one invoice takes 20 minutes on average. And most hotels still have no clear picture of their business and revenue. Mews just launched five new products to change that, and the people who built them are here to walk you through each one. Matt talks Automations and Guest Messaging with Joel Ndreu, VP Product & Engineering, Front of House; Mews BI and Mews RMS with Conor Winders, VP Product & Engineering, Back of House; and Accounts Receivable with Yael Barak, VP of FinTech, Product & Engineering.

Why are hotels charging the same for a parking spot on a Tuesday and on a Saturday? For Mews CEO Matt Welle, that question sums up everything wrong with how hotels think about revenue and technology. In this solo episode, he breaks down one of the most debated questions in hotel tech: should your property run an open, best-of-breed stack or commit to a closed, all-in-one ecosystem? Matt draws lessons from Shopify, Toast and ServiceTitan, and explains Mews’ approach to the debate, including what’s coming up next.