Juggling hotel operations shouldn’t feel this chaotic.
If you’re tired of clunky property management systems and front desk bottlenecks, you’re probably searching for a platform that actually makes things easier for you and your guests. In my analysis, I found that wasted hours fixing manual booking errors can seriously drag down your team’s productivity and guest satisfaction. To streamline your operations and boost growth, choosing the right solution is paramount.
Mews takes a modern, cloud-based approach—automating everything from reservations and payments to guest self-service—so you can retire old processes for good. This open platform stands out by letting you connect with over 800 pre-built integrations, build your custom workflows, and actually gain visibility into your business with real analytics.
In this review, I’ll break down how Mews simplifies day-to-day hotel operations and gives you more control over your guest journey, staff workload, and business data.
You’ll get a full Mews review with detailed insights on platform features, pricing, integrations, and what to know before booking a demo.
You’ll learn the features you need to compare your options confidently and avoid nasty surprises after rollout.
Let’s dig in.
Quick Summary
- Mews is a cloud-native hospitality platform that automates hotel operations with property management, guest self-service, payments, and integrations.
- Best for modern hotels and multi-property groups wanting to streamline operations and enhance guest experience.
- You’ll appreciate its open API and extensive marketplace that allow flexible integrations and tech customization.
- Mews offers subscription pricing per room with custom quotes, plus a free demo but no free trial.
Mews Overview
Mews has been around since 2012, with its headquarters in London. My research shows their entire mission is to transform hotel operations by replacing clunky, legacy software.
I found they target a wide range of properties, from independent boutiques to large, multi-property hotel groups. What really impressed me is their focus on building a truly open hospitality cloud, which gives you much more flexibility.
Their recent $185 million funding round and key acquisitions show serious growth momentum. This aggressive innovation is an important confidence signal in my Mews review.
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Unlike legacy giants like Oracle OPERA, which I find can be overwhelmingly complex, Mews prioritizes a superior user experience. Their entire platform feels like it was designed by actual hoteliers for today’s needs.
You’ll see them working with innovative brands and growing multi-property groups, which proves to me the platform’s impressive scalability for almost any type of hotel.
From my evaluation, their strategy is all about empowering your guests with modern self-service options and giving you an open, API-first platform. This directly addresses the market’s shift toward automation.
Now let’s dive into their features.
Mews Features
Outdated hotel operations causing constant headaches?
Mews isn’t just software; it’s a complete Hospitality Cloud designed to modernize your property’s core. These are the five core Mews solutions that tackle critical operational challenges for modern hotels.
1. Mews Operations (Core PMS)
Tired of clunky front-desk software?
Legacy PMS systems often mean endless clicks and manual puzzles for staff. This frustrates your team and slows down check-ins.
Mews Operations provides an intuitive, timeline-based dashboard for all core tasks, from reservations to housekeeping. From my testing, the drag-and-drop booking management is incredibly efficient, automating room assignments and freeing staff. This central solution streamlines your daily property management.
This means you gain a clean, efficient command center that reduces manual work and improves overall operational flow for your front desk.
2. The Mews Guest Journey
Guest queues piling up at reception?
Traditional check-in processes create frustrating bottlenecks for guests and overburden your staff. It leads to a less-than-ideal first impression.
The Mews Guest Journey empowers guests with self-service options, from online check-in to digital keys. Here’s what I found: automated pre-arrival communication drastically reduces front-desk queues, letting guests bypass reception entirely. This complete guest-facing solution enhances satisfaction.
The result is happy guests who experience a smoother stay, while your team gets more time to focus on personalized service rather than administrative tasks.
3. Mews Payments
Are payment errors eating into your profits?
Manual credit card handling introduces human error, security risks, and complicates PCI compliance. This can lead to chargebacks and financial headaches.
Mews Payments fully automates the payment lifecycle through its built-in gateway. What impressed me most is how it securely tokenizes cards for automated deposits and settlements. This feature eliminates manual entry, reducing both errors and compliance burdens significantly.
So, as an owner or manager, you can ensure secure, accurate transactions that minimize financial risk and provide a seamless payment experience for your guests.
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4. Mews Marketplace & API
Disconnected hotel tech slowing you down?
Hotels rely on many disparate systems that often don’t communicate. This creates data silos and forces inefficient manual workarounds between departments.
The Mews Marketplace acts like an app store, offering hundreds of pre-built integrations with critical hotel tools like POS and revenue management. This is where Mews shines: its open API allows for custom connections, enabling a truly bespoke tech stack. This comprehensive solution bridges data gaps effortlessly.
What you get instead is a fully integrated ecosystem where all your systems talk to each other, allowing for smarter decisions and eliminating painful manual data transfers.
5. Mews Business Intelligence (BI)
Can’t get deep insights from basic reports?
Standard PMS reports are often rigid and provide only a superficial view of your hotel’s performance. This leaves you guessing about key business trends.
Mews Business Intelligence provides advanced analytics, allowing you to build custom dashboards and track crucial metrics like RevPAR and ADR. From my evaluation, this module offers robust comparative analysis across properties, giving you a clearer picture. This solution is key for data-driven decisions.
This means you can finally move beyond basic operational data to identify valuable booking sources and trends, empowering you to make strategic choices that boost profitability.
Pros & Cons
- ✅ Clean, intuitive interface significantly upgrades operations.
- ✅ Extensive automation frees staff from manual, repetitive tasks.
- ✅ Vast marketplace and open API enable a truly custom tech stack.
- ⚠️ Initial setup and deep functionality require a significant learning commitment.
- ⚠️ Basic reporting lacks depth, pushing users to premium BI features.
What I love about these Mews solutions is how they all function as one cohesive platform, ensuring your operations, guest experience, and payments are always in sync.
Mews Pricing
Wondering what Mews will actually cost your business?
Mews pricing is based on a custom quote, meaning you’ll need to contact sales for a personalized proposal. What I found regarding Mews pricing is its transparent, per-room subscription, adapting to your specific property needs.
Cost Breakdown
- Base Platform: Custom quote based on property size, typically $6-14 (€5-12) per room/month (estimated)
- Implementation: One-time setup and onboarding fee (standard for PMS migration)
- Mews Payments: Transaction fees (e.g., 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction)
- Integrations: Varies; third-party software has separate subscription costs
- Key Factors: Number of rooms, specific modules chosen, transaction volume
1. Pricing Model & Cost Factors
Understanding their cost drivers.
Mews primarily uses a per-room, per-month (PRPM) subscription model, scaling pricing directly with your property’s size. What I found is that larger hotels typically receive a lower PRPM rate, which makes it competitive for enterprise clients. Your final cost hinges on room count, the modules you select (like Business Intelligence), and transaction volume via Mews Payments.
This means your monthly costs stay aligned precisely with your operational footprint and specific feature needs.
2. Value Assessment & ROI
Is this an investment, not just a cost?
Mews transforms hotel operations, boosting efficiency and guest satisfaction, leading to operational efficiencies and revenue growth. Their cloud-native platform minimizes IT overhead compared to legacy systems. What I found is that their pricing offers scalable value for diverse properties, providing strong ROI by adapting effectively to your business needs.
This approach helps you justify the investment by connecting costs directly to tangible business outcomes and enhanced guest satisfaction.
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3. Budget Planning & Implementation
Anticipate full ownership costs.
Beyond the per-room subscription, factor in the one-time implementation fee covering setup and training. Mews Payments also carries transaction fees. Remember, third-party integrations have separate costs. From my research, your total cost of ownership includes these add-on expenses standard for a comprehensive PMS migration.
So for your business, expect to allocate budget beyond just the monthly subscription to ensure a smooth, complete deployment.
My Take: Mews pricing strategy offers a highly customized, scalable model well-suited for hotels seeking a modern, automated PMS, particularly beneficial for those looking to optimize operations and guest experience.
The overall Mews pricing reflects scalable, customized value for modern hotel operations, helping you align investment with actual property size and evolving needs. This bespoke approach ensures you pay only for what genuinely serves your business.
Mews Reviews
Real user feedback reveals Mews’ truth.
To provide you with genuine insights, I’ve analyzed countless Mews reviews from platforms like G2 and Capterra. This section dives into what customers actually think, offering a balanced view of their experiences.
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1. Overall User Satisfaction
High satisfaction with a learning curve.
From my review analysis, Mews consistently earns high ratings, averaging 4.6/5 stars across thousands of user submissions. What I found in user feedback is a clear pattern: users praise the modern, flexible experience, though a significant learning curve is common for new adopters. This duality shapes overall sentiment.
This suggests you can expect a trade-off: initial setup effort for a modern system, balanced against the long-term gains of its advanced automation and powerful features.
2. Common Praise Points
Users consistently love Mews’ modern approach.
Review-wise, customers repeatedly highlight Mews’ modern UI as a significant upgrade over legacy systems. The automation of payments and guest communication is frequently cited, saving valuable staff time. What stands out is the extensive Marketplace and open API, enabling tech-forward hoteliers to build a truly integrated tech stack.
This means you can expect enhanced efficiency, a smoother guest journey, and greater flexibility for your property’s operations, adapting well to modern hospitality demands.
3. Frequent Complaints
Some common frustrations do emerge.
What I found in user feedback is a recurrent theme: Mews has a steep learning curve, especially for non-technical staff. Many customers report standard reporting limitations, often feeling pushed towards the more expensive BI module. Furthermore, response times for non-critical support issues can sometimes be slow, a common trait for rapidly growing SaaS.
These issues suggest you should allocate ample training time and consider the BI module if advanced reporting is crucial for your business.
What Customers Say
- Positive: “The online check-in is our most loved feature. It has reduced our check-in times by about 75% and our guests are delighted to just pick up their key.”
- Constructive: “Reporting is not Mews’ strong point. The basic reports are too limited, and creating your own reports is not user friendly at all unless you pay extra for the full BI commander.”
- Bottom Line: “The sheer amount of integrations is Mews’ biggest pro. No other PMS in this price range comes close to the amount of flexibility you have to build your ideal tech stack.”
Overall, Mews reviews reflect a powerful, modern system, ideal for tech-forward properties. While an initial learning investment is required, the long-term benefits in automation and flexibility are evident. My analysis shows genuine user satisfaction, despite a learning curve.
Best Mews Alternatives
Choosing the right hospitality tech is critical.
The best Mews alternatives include several strong options, each better suited for different property types, operational scales, and technology priorities you might have for your business.
1. Cloudbeds
Prioritizing ease of use for smaller properties?
Cloudbeds often shines for smaller, independent properties due to its highly intuitive interface and robust integrated channel manager. What I found comparing options is that Cloudbeds offers simpler usability out-of-the-box, making this alternative a solid choice if your team values immediate adoption over deep customization capabilities.
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You should choose Cloudbeds for absolute ease of use and a tightly integrated channel manager in smaller, independent properties.
2. Oracle OPERA Cloud
Are you a large global hotel chain?
Oracle OPERA Cloud remains the enterprise standard, designed for vast global operations with incredibly complex needs and high budgets. From my competitive analysis, OPERA delivers unmatched depth for large chains, though its setup is less intuitive and innovation slower compared to more modern alternative solutions.
Choose OPERA Cloud for large, full-service global hotel chains with substantial budgets and complex operational needs.
3. Apaleo
Do you want to build a bespoke tech stack?
Apaleo, like Mews, is API-first, but leans even more into a ‘headless’ core PMS concept, ideal for highly technical teams. This alternative empowers you to assemble a completely custom tech stack, meaning you’ll leverage their marketplace to build exactly what you need from various vendors.
Choose Apaleo if your team is highly technical and aims to build a completely custom, integrated tech stack from the ground up.
4. Stayntouch
Is mobile-first guest experience your priority?
Stayntouch excels with its mobile-first design, empowering staff to manage operations and guests to check-in via tablets from anywhere on property. Alternative-wise, Stayntouch delivers a truly untethered front desk experience, though its broader feature set beyond the front desk isn’t as extensive as Mews.
Choose Stayntouch if your top priority is a fully mobile, curb-side check-in and untethering front-desk staff.
Quick Decision Guide
- Choose Mews: For modern, scalable, guest-centric operations across diverse property sizes.
- Choose Cloudbeds: For smaller properties prioritizing user-friendliness and integrated channel management.
- Choose Oracle OPERA Cloud: For large, global chains with complex needs and significant budgets.
- Choose Apaleo: For highly technical teams building bespoke tech stacks from a lean core.
- Choose Stayntouch: For properties prioritizing mobile-first check-in and untethered staff operations.
Ultimately, the best Mews alternatives depend on your specific operational priorities and desired level of integration. What I found comparing options is that choosing wisely means matching platform to needs, not just features.
Setup & Implementation
Switching PMS is a major undertaking.
From my Mews review, switching your Property Management System (PMS) is a significant undertaking, not a simple plug-and-play. You’ll need to prepare for a structured but intensive deployment process that impacts your entire operation.
1. Setup Complexity & Timeline
This isn’t a simple plug-and-play solution.
Mews implementation is a structured process involving technical setup, extensive configuration, and critical data migration. What I found about deployment is that timelines vary from weeks to a couple of months, depending heavily on your property’s complexity. It’s an intensive commitment.
You’ll need a dedicated Mews specialist overseeing your project, ensuring proper scoping. Plan accordingly for a structured, focused transition.
2. Technical Requirements & Integration
Prepare for significant data migration efforts.
Migrating guest profiles, future bookings, and financial data is Mews implementation’s most critical technical step. From my analysis, success heavily depends on your legacy data’s quality, often requiring meticulous cleanup. An open API allows integrations, but each connection adds complexity.
Your IT team must prepare for thorough data validation and plan for third-party system integrations to ensure a smooth transition.
3. Training & Change Management
Staff training is key to adoption.
Mews has a notable learning curve, requiring staff to adapt to new workflows and its depth of functionality. From my analysis, dedicated time for Mews University training is crucial, as is preparing for a temporary dip in productivity during the learning phase.
You’ll need a robust change management strategy, appointing internal champions to guide your team through the transition smoothly.
4. Support & Success Factors
Vendor support matters during rollout.
Mews offers 24/7 support, primarily via ticketing and chat, with knowledgeable staff. What I found about deployment is that response times for lower-priority issues can be slow, so factor this into your expectations. Proactive internal project ownership is critical for success.
Assign an internal project manager, establish clear communication protocols, and leverage Mews’ training resources diligently for a smoother rollout.
Implementation Checklist
- Timeline: Few weeks to several months, depending on complexity
- Team Size: Dedicated Mews specialist, internal project lead, all staff
- Budget: Professional services for setup, dedicated training time
- Technical: Meticulous legacy data migration, 3rd-party integrations
- Success Factor: Dedicated training time and robust change management
Overall, Mews implementation is a substantial but manageable project. With careful planning and dedicated team involvement, you can successfully deploy this modern PMS to transform your operations and guest experience effectively.
Who’s Mews For
Who is Mews truly designed for?
In this Mews review, I’ll help you pinpoint if this hospitality management software truly aligns with your specific business profile. We’ll analyze ideal users, team sizes, and use cases to guide your decision.
1. Ideal User Profile
Modern, guest-centric hospitality businesses.
Mews shines for modern, forward-thinking hospitality businesses prioritizing guest experience and automation. From my user analysis, boutique hotels and multi-property groups especially benefit, seeking a cloud-native platform for streamlined operations and unique tech-enabled guest journeys.
You’ll find success if you embrace technology as a competitive edge and are ready to invest time in training to leverage Mews’ powerful automation and integrations.
2. Business Size & Scale
Scalable for diverse hospitality operations.
Mews serves various property types, from independent boutique hotels to large, multi-property groups. What I found about target users is that its flexibility suits both hybrid hotels and serviced apartments, offering robust management for diverse room types and varying stay durations.
You’ll find it’s a good fit if your business is growing and needs a unified system capable of handling multiple properties or complex room inventories.
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3. Use Case Scenarios
Optimizing guest experience and operations.
Mews excels in scenarios demanding high guest satisfaction and operational automation. User-wise, it’s perfect for properties wanting to offer online check-in, digital keys, and automated communications. Its open API supports building a best-in-class tech stack, integrating seamlessly with diverse hospitality tools.
You’ll see strong benefits if your priority is enhancing guest journeys, automating routine tasks, and leveraging extensive software integrations.
4. Who Should Look Elsewhere
Not ideal for every hotelier.
Mews might not be for you if you run a very small B&B requiring the simplest, cheapest solution. From my user analysis, organizations highly resistant to new technology workflows or those with minimal IT resources often find the learning curve too steep initially.
Consider alternatives if budget is your sole concern or your team prefers minimal change and a more traditional, less automated operational approach.
Best Fit Assessment
- Perfect For: Modern, tech-forward boutique, multi-property, or hybrid hospitality businesses.
- Business Size: Independent properties to large multi-property hotel groups.
- Primary Use Case: Guest experience automation, operational efficiency, and extensive integrations.
- Budget Range: For those willing to invest in technology as a competitive advantage.
- Skip If: Very small B&B or highly resistant to new technology workflows.
In this Mews review, assessing who should use Mews really comes down to your willingness to embrace modern hospitality technology. It’s built for those ready to transform operations.
Bottom Line
Mews offers a transformative hospitality solution.
This Mews review synthesizes comprehensive analysis into a clear recommendation, helping you understand the platform’s overall value proposition and next steps for your software evaluation with confidence.
1. Overall Strengths
Mews redefines hotel operations.
Mews excels with its modern, intuitive UI and powerful automation for payments, communication, and reporting. Its extensive marketplace and open API integrations foster a truly best-in-class tech stack, offering unparalleled flexibility for tech-forward hoteliers. From my comprehensive analysis, guest-facing features like online check-in are particularly lauded by users.
These capabilities directly translate into significant time savings, enhanced guest experiences, and future-proof operational efficiency for your property.
2. Key Limitations
Some significant considerations remain.
While powerful, Mews has a steep learning curve, especially for non-technical users, requiring dedicated training and patience. Standard reporting can be basic, often pushing users towards the more expensive Mews BI module for advanced insights. Customer support response times also vary for non-critical issues.
These are manageable trade-offs for organizations committed to modernization, but demand upfront planning and patience during adoption.
3. Final Recommendation
Highly recommended for forward-thinking properties.
You should choose Mews if you’re an independent boutique hotel or a multi-property group aiming for a cloud-native, guest-centric PMS with extensive integration needs. From my analysis, it excels for properties embracing automation and a modern tech stack. Consider Mews if you’re prepared for an initial learning investment.
Your decision should factor in your team’s tech readiness and commitment to leveraging a truly advanced system for operational transformation.
Bottom Line
- Verdict: Recommended with reservations for prepared businesses
- Best For: Independent hotels & multi-property groups seeking modern cloud PMS
- Biggest Strength: Modern UI, robust automation, and extensive integrations
- Main Concern: Steep learning curve and basic standard reporting
- Next Step: Request a personalized demo to assess its fit
Overall, this Mews review confirms it is a robust, future-proof PMS offering strong value for the right hospitality business ready for transformation. I am confident in this assessment.