Mews says its new Guest Messaging tool uses AI to instantly resolve 80% of routine guest queries, attacking a problem the company quantifies bluntly: one in three guest messages goes unanswered, and guests who do get a reply wait eight hours on average.

The Amsterdam-based hospitality software firm launched Guest Messaging and Automations on 1 October 2026 as native features of its platform, which spans PMS, POS, RMS, housekeeping and payments across 15,000 customers in 85 countries. The two products address the same cost from opposite ends: too much staff attention goes to repetitive triage work.

What does Guest Messaging replace?

Guest Messaging consolidates multi-channel guest communications — SMS, WhatsApp, Booking.com, Expedia and the Mews Guest Portal — into a single thread tied to the guest's profile and reservation. A guest can text from the airport, switch to WhatsApp on arrival, then use the guest portal, and staff see one conversation, not three.

Mews AI, trained on the property's own data, answers routine questions instantly: pool hours, parking, late checkout, breakfast. Because the AI sees the whole guest profile — room status, billing, special requests — it never asks guests for details the PMS already holds. The system replaces the fragmented inbox-checking that front desk staff currently perform across six or seven channels.

Matt Marrs, operator at Llano Real Estate Group, said: "Guest messaging has been a game changer for us. We can broadcast a message to everyone checking in or checking out on a given day — like letting guests know the pool's closed for maintenance — instead of reaching out one by one. And because the AI is trained on our own answers, it automatically handles common questions like pool hours, so we're not spending time typing out the same replies over and over."

How do Automations work?

The second feature targets loyalty operations rather than revenue. While most hospitality automation focuses on upsells, dynamic pricing and paid upgrades, Mews Automations lets general managers build no-code rules that run every shift: a returning-guest welcome, a birthday recognition, a newly reached loyalty tier, a VIP who always gets the corner room.

The economics are already visible in deployments. At selected Strawberry properties, up to 60% of upgrades for Gold & Platinum guests were automated. Paired with Guest Messaging, an arriving guest automatically receives a personalized welcome message with their door access PIN at check-in.

Maurits Bots, hotel ICT specialist at WestCord, said he built "a fully automated room check workflow without a single hour of engineering time." He added: "For a hotel our size, that's the difference between a task that gets forgotten and one that simply gets done — consistently, every week."

Who pays, and what changes on shift?

Mews positions the tools as a labor reallocation rather than a headcount cut: front desk staff spend less time triaging inboxes while GMs and IT managers configure the rules once in a no-code workflow engine. Joel Ndreu, VP Product & Engineering at Mews, framed the operational problem directly: "Your front desk team isn't slow, they're drowning. Checking multiple inboxes when they should be looking up from the screen isn't what hospitality is about."

He continued: "Automations means the things that make a guest feel remembered happen automatically, without anyone having to be the one who remembers. No missed birthday, no upgrade forgotten, no opportunity lost because the right person wasn't on shift."

Demand during testing gives a scale signal: 47,000 automations ran across Mews during the beta alone. Mews says Automations will continue to expand, giving properties flexibility to design operational workflows to suit their business — a signal the company intends the workflow engine, not just the messaging inbox, to be the growth surface.