We are looking for some good mobile first housekeeping software to implement with Mews. The Functionality in mews is to limiting for us and is not clear enough on the housekeepers side. One of the most important features is the realtime room/space status in mews, so once a room is marked as clean by a housekeeper it should instantly update the space status to clean or inspected in Mews.
Also, housekeepers should see all booked products and note’s clearly, not hidden away somewhere and what would be even better if they would get a “task list” per room with everything that should be done extra like adding rose petals or a bottle of champagne.
After some research I found Flexkeeper and it looks really appealing with all the features we would like to see. But I was wondering if there is anybody here who has experience with Flexkeeper or perhaps any other tool that works for them.
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Hello Dirkjan,
thank you for this great question, this is Markéta from Mews!
I actually tried all that out in my Demo and App and I believe that our App is able to handle what you are looking for.
First I marked some rooms as clean in the App and in my Space status this also changed within seconds (after refreshing the screen).
Then I added some notes to a reservation via Properties tab and created a task via Status tab.
I opened my App and checked the tasks, I am able to see the task, its description and also the notes.
Let me know if I am forgetting something
I am sharing also our article on Housekeeping apps - Flexkeeper is one of them, but this question could be better answered by other properties, that are actually using these integrations.
Have a wonderful day!
Markéta
Hello Markéta, thank you for your answer.
i know what the Mews app does we use it currently, but it does not do everything i want.
It does not show the booked products.
Also it shows all the note’s even all the ota note’s like “pre-paid charges” or “booking.com free upgrades” etc. This clutters the notes and thus people get lazy and eventually don’t even read the notes anymore.
it has no options to create tasks every x days automatically like turn over mattresses or check shower drain or clean windows.
also i would like the housekeepers to be able to report maintenance issues without blocking the room and with pictures. A scratch in the floor or a dent in the wall should not block the room or put it out of service, something like that can be fixed next week or even later. And it would be handy if you could add maintenance staff who automatically get a push notification that a maintenance task was created.
i am wondering what apps other properties use.
Hello Dirkjan,
thank you for the specification!
I do understand that the Mews housekeeping app is not perfect (yet ) but at Mews, we love new ideas!
It would be awesome, if you could share your comments on our feedback page which is monitored by our product mangers and popular ideas are being implemented.
Make sure that your colleagues also vote for this idea, so you create more traction.
Thank you for making Mews better!
Markéta
@santi.laresgoiti@Claudio Lupica@mauritsbots@Cathy@Bell@JanH any input you can give to @Dirkjan here on Flexkeeping and how it’s working for your day to day management of housekeeping. Thanks for your community support
hi Dirkjan, we have 6 WestCord properties operating Flexkeeping. Feel free to get in touch; im sure we can organize a live demo [email protected]
Hi Dirkjan I would as well have a look at the hotelkit / mews integration regarding the housekeeping functionalities. We are using hotelkit to plan and messure all housekeeping operations within the hotel. I think it is a great tool to reduce the manual work within the housekeeping department and make sure they are always up to date in real time.
KR Benjamin
Hi,
We went through 2 partners that integrate with Mews for HSK - RoomChecking and now with Knowcross.
Roomchecking was quite flexible with the opportunity to forecast. They also developed new version which should be better. The only issue with them is the SLA, as they are quite small company and struggle with the support piece.
Knowcross/Unifocus is well known I think as has been operating for a while. What you get from that is software with a lot of experience, where jobs and tasks are well refined from years of case studies. They have very strong Maintenance module and quite flexible in making these additional HSK tasks reality. The shortcoming is that there is no forecasting to support your labouring. Although would come in the near future as they got bough by Unifocus that just does that.
Either way you will need to deploy mobile phones for HSK team and adoption is challenging most of the times. We just redeployed across 26 properties.
Maybe you can use the above as examples to compare against Flexkeeping, it seemed as a good solution anyway, when we interviewed them.
Good luck!
We were with Roomchecking and are actually going back to it. Before, with our in-house team, and now with our outsourced hskp team.
Hi there! I also have the impression (beeing new to MEWS) that housekeeping functionality has some room left for improvement ;-)
For example, I believe that it would be very helpful to have separate notes for housekeeping or different departments.
Why? Reservations notes are often cluttered with automatic comments from OTAs and those are shown to housekeeping, too. It cannot be expected from housekeeping staff to weed through a sea of notes to find the relevant information for each room. This must be a separate note cetegory where reservation or front office can enter only a short comment for housekeeping (like "baby cot" or "allergy friendly blankets") - this field should be displayed in the app for HK and/or the housekeeping report. This would be helpful no matter if your are using a third party app or not, because also separate apps cannot deliver information to housekeepers, that is not in MEWS to begin with. Having separate note categories would allow third party apps to fetch only those notes that are relevant in the context.
I have created a feature request on feedback.mews.com, vote for it if you consider this important, too:
we’re using “Hotelkit Housekeeping” and it works well for our needs.
Best regards,
Christian
@Dirkjan We are currently evaluating sweeply - I think it’s very affordable and gets the basic features right. However, since MEWS doesn’t provide separte HK notes they also just import all the booking notes. I raised the issue with them during our trial, and they promised to look into it, but could not commit to make it happen (I suggested to implement for example a #-tag filter, so that only lines in the booking notes with an #housekeeping hash tag prefix would be shown, or to use dummy products in MEWS to show commonly needed HK requests like extra bed, baby bed, etc...) Hotelkit does work with dummy products you can add to a reservation in MEWS and it will map certain predefined HK tasks / notes to the room info in hotelkit. However, for us hotelkit is to expensive and unnecessarily complex/powerful, but for a larger team it might make more sense…
Regards,
Jean-Philipp.
@Dirkjan we’ve been live with Maitre for 3 months - https://maitrehotel.com/ and we were the pilot for their MEWS integration. It’s been a game changer for us. Happy to put you in touch with our account manager for a demo.
Darren
Thanks Darren just had aDemo from Maitre . Looks good product just waiting for pricing . Found flexkeeper and Hotelkit and optii just too expensive both in terms of set fees and monthly cost . they are costing more than Mews starter Pack. We are look for a cost effective solution for a 10 bed Hostel with 46 beds.
James
Darren We just signed up with Maitre last week just waiting for it to go live
Thanks
James
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