Rewiring Hotel Tech for Humans

Mews founder Richard Valtr argues hospitality needs to embrace technology more, a point he made during this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast.
Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko talk travel every week.
Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko talk travel every week.
Learn More
This episode of the Skift Travel Podcast featured a discussion with Richard Valtr, founder of cloud-PMS provider Mews, which took place during the Mews Unfold conference in Amsterdam. Valtr talked with Head of Research Seth Borko about the company's vision and why hospitality undervalues technology.
Listen Now
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS
Five Key Points
Hotel Tech Is Burdened by Legacy Systems: Valtr explains that many of the entrenched problems in hotel tech stem from the early adoption of digital systems that were ahead of their time. These legacy systems, like those used in airlines (e.g., Sabre), became rigid and unable to adapt to modern needs. Mews aims to address these limitations by building more flexible and intuitive systems designed with hoteliers in mind.
Industry Standardization Needs to Evolve: While hotel brands have historically emphasized standardization to scale globally and ensure consistency, Valtr argues that today's technology enables personalization and richer guest experiences. Mews seeks to elevate industry norms by leveraging modern tools—like AI and automation—to recapture the personal touch once common in hospitality.
Modernizing Hospitality Employment and Operations: The industry needs to rethink traditional hospitality roles and working conditions — like long front desk shifts — and introduce more flexibility and automation in back-end operations. Leveraging automation can help reduce unnecessary labor while improving both employee well-being and operational efficiency.
Industry Resistance to Tech is Cultural, Not Logical: A persistent challenge in hospitality is a cultural reluctance to embrace technology, particularly among older leadership. The next generation of hoteliers is expected to drive more tech-forward, guest-centric operations by seeing tech as an enabler, not an obstacle.
The Future: Interoperability, Empathy, and AI: Technologies like computer vision and data-sharing (e.g., from platforms like Uber) can create truly personalized, seamless guest experiences. Mews envisions a future where tech augments human empathy—identifying guest moods or preferences on arrival—and blends invisible data flows into intuitive service that defines modern luxury.
Episode Summary
Borko and Valtr discussed the evolution of hotel technology. Valtr explained that the original vision behind Mews was to eliminate the impersonal and transactional nature of hotel check-ins by creating a more human-centric, tech-enabled guest experience.
Although Mews has grown into a Property Management System (PMS) that acts as a hotel's central nervous system, integrating booking, guest data, and operations, Valtr emphasized that Mews is more than a PMS. It's evolved into a guest management and profitability optimization platform.
Valtr also said that while standardization helped the hotel industry scale efficiently — enabling tasks like cleaning 100 rooms quickly — it should now serve as a foundation, not the goal. With modern technology, it's possible to return to a more personalized, 17th-century-style guest experience, once impossible due to technological limitations.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Bloomberg

17 minutes ago

• Bloomberg

Irish Regulator Warns Against Caving to Pressure on Bank Rules

Ireland's top banking supervisor warned of a need to stick with high standards of financial regulation particularly now when there is increasing pressure to ease them amid trade wars, geopolitical tensions and fears for global growth. 'If we're trying to chase growth with a deregulation engine I don't think that's going to end well for anybody,' Mary-Elizabeth McMunn, Deputy Governor for Financial Regulation at the Central Bank of Ireland, said at Bloomberg's Future of Finance event in Dublin. 'It also can't be that you simplify things just to such a degree that you really fail to capture complex risks.'

TechCrunch

31 minutes ago

• TechCrunch

Goliath wins? This new intelligence gives giants start-up speed

Start-ups aiming to disrupt industry giants are facing a new obstacle: incumbents that understand their code as deeply as nimble challengers. Historically, big companies have been weighed down by decades of accumulated code. Fixing a problem or rolling out a new feature couldn't be done without months of manual code discovery. Wrong turns and dead ends in software development were just accepted as the cost of doing business, even as the business lost market share to new entrants. But now, the emergence of 'Software Intelligence' (SI) technology is turning big company's labyrinths of black boxes crystal clear, enabling CIOs, architects, and developers to cut those months of work to minutes. Like military intelligence surveying a battlefield, Software Intelligence approaches code as territory to be mapped and navigated. Scanning the source code of one application — or even thousands across an IT portfolio — SI generates 3D maps and dashboards in seconds, revealing the facts on the digital ground. That on-premise code that won't work in the cloud? It's pinpointed, along with the route around it. A mountain of technical debt you can't climb? Broken down by the number of hours to fix each flaw and ranked by 'bang for the buck'. A new security crack opening in the open-source code? It's automatically surfaced without having to distract busy developers. The impact is profound. 'Imagine you're captaining a ship in the year 1500,' says Greg Rivera, product manager at CAST, a software mapping and intelligence company. 'You don't know what's on the other side of the ocean you're trying to cross. You may not even know if you're sailing in circles. One day, you're handed satellite photos, step-by-step routes, and a GPS showing you where you are. That's the level of change happening in IT.' And since companies live and die by how fast their IT can move, SI is becoming a CEO imperative and a boardroom topic. 'When you can finally see the pathway, you can finally run down it,' says Rivera. Software Intelligence's insights are instant, but getting to this point has taken more than 25 years of collecting data on how companies build, rebuild, and change their software. CAST has analyzed over a hundred billion lines of code to uncover more than 50,000 repeated patterns. AI Enters the Chat Humans are the first consumers of Software Intelligence, but they're not the only ones hungry for insights. Right now, CIOs use SI to gain control over their sprawling portfolios, reduce risks, and make fact-based decisions – for instance, when prioritizing which applications to modernize. Architects meanwhile use SI to navigate inside individual applications to avoid wrong turns during modernization. But AI wants to know these things too. Why? Because while AI is great at writing new code, it can't modernize an existing codebase until it first knows how it's constructed. All its elements, interactions, and dependencies across applications must be mapped. Since 80% of developer work takes place on existing code, connecting SI's insights to AI's abilities has become an industry necessity. Applying this approach, insurance and risk management giant Marsh McLennan prompted their AI with insights extracted from SI's examination of their code. The idea was to see if a giant codebase could then be modernized at AI-speed. It could. 'CAST went line-by-line across the technology stack of several of our applications, distilling their objects and dependencies,' said Paul Beswick, Global CIO and COO at Marsh McLennan. 'This information was then used by the AI to fix issues and reduce the technical debt in the software. Hundreds of objects requiring coding changes were remediated, and a process that could have taken a few months was cut to a few minutes.' Giants aren't the only ones moving faster. Start-ups can benefit from this too. 'Vibe-coding is making it easier than ever for a company to advance from zero to one,' says Rivera. 'But the codebase that gets you to 'one' is built with speed in mind, resulting in a lot of tech debt. Most of that needs to be rearchitected for a company to reach the next level: scale.' Vibe coders are going to need their own map, too — to take on Goliath. Learn more about Software Intelligence here.

Forbes

32 minutes ago

• Forbes

'Waiting for A Miracle' In Bordeaux. Demand Is Down And So Are Prices.

SAINT EMILION, FRANCE - AUGUST 22: Replica of Bordeaux bottles are seen in a shop August 22, 2003 ... More in Saint Emilion outside Bordeaux. (Photo by Pascal)Winemaking in Bordeaux is never easy, even in the best of years, yet the region's promoters always seem to find a silver lining even in weak vintages. So the title 'Waiting for a Miracle' of a two-part survey by Wine Lister, a business consultant to the fine wine business, laced with phrases like 'crossing the Red Sea,' 'stormy weather,' 'a difficult situation' and 'turning point' comes as something of a shock at a time when the on-again-off-again Trump tariffs have added tremendous uncertainty to an industry based on grapevines that pay more attention to the weather than to international trade negotiations. Founder and CEO Ella Lister of industry consulting firm Wine Lister Compiled by Founder and CEO Ella Lister, Head of Clients and Marketing Tara Albini and Head of Analysyis Maggie Haan, Wine Lister does indicate that the 'murmurs of poor weather conditions and compromised fruit circulating nearly a year ago' were blunted by 'meticulous attention to detail in the vineyard and winery, coupled with unrivalled technology' that 'averted a disaster.' Declaring that 2024 was a very good year for dry whites and several reds, newly released wines are now more attractively priced, with discounts on the 2023 vintage in the UK down 20% to 30%, along with reduced volume ––this at a time of a worldwide wine glut. French wine and spirits global exports fell 4% last year and a 30% drop in sales volume is expected this year. At auction volumes also fell overall (38%). Quality scores for almost all 2024 Bordeaux dropped according to Wine Lister. Wine Lister's critics tasted en primeur Bordeaux over a nine-day period to find the wines to be 'restrained and vertical in nature, usually balanced, though sometimes austere,' with just 20 wines out of 134 recording an increase in scores. The top rated red wine was Château Latour with a score of 95.75 (out of 100), despite being down 1.5 points vs 2023. Among the top three risers are white wines, with La Mission Haut-Brion Blanc at the top. The silver lining in 2024 was low alcohol levels caused by cooler weather conditions, with wines often at around 13% ABV or lower, in contrast to growing levels of an increasing number of hot weather vintages. The wines of Saint-Émilion saw the steepest drop. 'Nonetheless, trade sentiment has been somewhat apathetic,' read the report, 'with consumers tightening their purse strings and choosing not to buy despite several wines sitting significantly below current market prices for back vintages.' The report also takes note that young people, pretty much worldwide, are 'largely disengaged,' a trend the industry is struggling to account for and reverse and it will take 'a concerted effort from all stakeholders––producers, the trade, and consumers alike–– to ensure Bordeaux retains its prestige and relevance in the modern fine Prices have dropped for the 2024 vintage. wine landscape.' Discounts are recommended across the board for the 2024 vintage up to 45% in Asia. Unanimously the industry knows that prices must drop in order to interest younger people to try wine in the first place, after boom years when the previous X generation (and part of the Y) boosted expectations that wine would increasingly be the drink of choice for decades to come. The result of that boost was that Bordeaux raised its prices, not just for the prestigious premier crus but for those below them. The consensus within the trade said that prices for the Asian market may have to be discounted 45%. BORDEAUX, FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 22: (NO UK Sales For 28 Days Post Create Date) King Charles III and ... More Queen Camilla do wine tasting during a visit Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte to learn about sustainable vineyard practices in the Bordeaux wine producing region. (Photo by Samir Hussein - Pool/WireImage) Merchants are recommending wine events that will draw in young people, though their numbers wouldn't really add up to much. Others suggest that wine tourism should be promoted, and that labels should be modernized, as German wine producers did a decade ago when they got rid of the old stylized Fraktur fonts better suited for a novel by Goethe. Interestingly enough, while Bordeaux sales languish, Burgundy's are up 16%, according to the Bourgogne Wine Board (BWB), with the U.S. share totaling 20.9 million bottles in 2024, an increase of 15.9% compared to 2023, representing 17.2% of Burgundy's revenue, with Chablis and Mâcon leading the pack. Silver linings aside, the report, which came out in April, does not treat of the Trump tariffs situation, which, after a threat of 200%, dictates a universal tariff of 10%, 20% on wines from France, Italy, Germany and Spain, and 30% on South African. The fall-out from those tariffs has yet to be fully felt. Winemakers have taken to saying their prayers in the vineyards.