Hotelier Perspectives

Talk to any hotelier about the guest journey, and the same themes tend to emerge: personalisation, seamless booking, loyalty, guest experience. Technology is expected to enhance all these moments. But there’s one step that often gets overlooked and yet it underpins the entire guest relationship: identity verification.

Summer brings a welcome surge in travel, with millions of people booking hotels, redeeming loyalty rewards, and flocking to vacation destinations. But as transaction volumes rise, so do fraud risks and many hospitality brands find themselves unprepared for the scale, speed, and sophistication of these attacks.

In hospitality, it’s not the lack of effort that slows teams down — it’s the lag between information and action. And all too often, that lag starts with communication that lives outside the flow of work.

In the rapidly evolving world of hospitality, a fundamental shift is underway. No longer is a hotel merely a place to rest one’s head; today, it’s a portal to emotion, exploration, and personalized engagement. The traditional benchmarks of luxury—thread count, square footage, and concierge services—are being replaced or complemented by immersive experiences and local storytelling. This new wave of hospitality, known as the "experience-first" approach, is all about designing hotels not just for comfort, but for creating lasting memories.

Cybersecurity probably isn’t high on your list of passions. But for any hotelier, it should be.

In hospitality, seasonality isn’t just a footnote in the budget—it’s often the main storyline. Whether it’s summer vacationers filling oceanfront suites, fall group travel spiking occupancy, or citywide events creating compression across an entire market, these seasonal surges are what make or break performance.

Travel can mean many things to many different people. For some, an adventurous solo trip can be just what the doctor ordered while for others, spontaneity can take a backseat, as planning for families around school breaks takes precedence. I’ve been lucky enough to get introduced to travel from a very young age— my passion for hospitality has been a constant companion throughout my life, influencing each step in my journey, and, for more than 25 years, I’ve been lucky enough to embrace it.

One of the great benefits of cloud-native technology is the ability to move at pace. Technology must move quickly to help hoteliers find new efficiency gains and revenue streams, and that’s exactly what Mews has been doing.

In today’s hospitality landscape, customer experience goes far beyond “friendly staff” and a “comfortable bed.” Guests no longer seek just rest—they want to feel like they’ve stepped into a personalized storyline, where every detail—from the room temperature to a well-timed push notification—conveys thoughtful care and meaning.

For the first time in four years, U.S. hoteliers are staring at a genuine cyclical crosswind: topline erosion combined with cost stickiness. RevPAR in upscale and upper-midscale is receding 4–5 percent year-over-year, and wage inflation still burns 11 percent hotter than last winter. In this environment, patience is expensive. The only sustainable advantage is the ability to reshape labor and operating inputs in real time—shrinking them when demand softens, expanding them when pop-up revenue appears. Done right, that agility doesn’t merely protect profit; it compounds it, because every point of flex you build now will amplify flow-through once the cycle turns.