Hi Hel,

Thank you for sharing your concern here. There are 2 approaches about this question you raised:

• The Booking engine feature in the Mews bookable service allows you to limit the number of adults to be able to book in one booking. Although this is not exactly what you aim for, I believe it’ll help you lead groups to book individually and so you’ll have more control over it.
  Just be aware that they will also have to book with different email addresses, otherwise it won’t help your cause.
• On the other hand, once the reservations are made, even if all them are booked under the same profile, they can be easily updated to host different guest profiles as owners. It will require some extra manual work but will prevent those issues with the mobile keys. This is explained here: How to change the owner and companions of a reservation? (mews.com)

I hope the explanation above helps you!

Ivan

Hi Ivan.

Thanks for your response.

This is actually my second reply to you as I had a beautifully detailed and well written follow-up response that got devoured by the internet gods when I pressed “submit” 

So hopefully I manage to remember everything I wrote the first time around…

Unfortunately, I am actually worried your explanation makes things worse.

I already tried testing setting the number of adults allowed to book, even setting it to 1 to see if that would solve the problem. But all that seems to affect is the number of guests that can be associated to each individual room. Not the maximum number of adults that can be associated to an entire booking. Even set to 1 adult maximum, it still allows a booker the option to “add another item” on the summary page where they can add another room with another 1 occupant*.

*Which right there, I would think, technically breaks the 1 adult limit per booking defined in the booking engine settings. Or is a “booking” by Mews definition actually a just a single room? Because this becomes an issue of language that  could affect the applicability of our T&Cs. Legally we need to be consistent with language so I want to be sure we understand how we need to refer to individual rooms, occupants, bookings, groups...etc. But I digress...  

Right on the summary page the booking engine offers a booker the ability to do exactly what screws up our entire customer journey. It encourages the creation of multiple room reservations whose only associated contact info for all the rooms in the group is the primary booker.

If there was a way to turn that “add another item” feature off we could work with that… because then we would have 1 set of contact info per room and we could try to find a way to communicate to the preson booking that each room needs a unique mobile number to be issued keys (that’s what we do now with our current PMS). But as far as I can tell there is no setting that removes that functionality from the booking engine.  

With Flexipass only one mobile key can active at any time on a single mobile device. So we need individual contact info for every guest that expects to receive a key. And Akia needs at least 1 unique primary occupant for each room to be able to contact them (by SMS or email) and assign and issue them a key to the correct room.

**As a side note… After a lot of painful testing and back and forth last year, we managed to craft a fully automated and guest/user friendly process through Akia to identify reservations where a secondary room occupant is present, collect the secondary occupant’s contact info, get that secondary occupant to agree to T&Cs and then issue them and the primary room occupants their key when the room is ready. But without individual primary contacts for every room… None of that works!

So…

If understand correctly, are you saying that currently the only way to collect the information we need for our entire operation to function smoothly is to:

1. Manually monitor and identify reservations that come through with multiple rooms booked under a single reservation
2. Then manually contact the primary booker to collect occupant information for every room within the reservation.
3. And manually update the contact information of the occupants of each room in the mews.com interface

That’s an awful lot of instances of the word manually… *sigh* Is that really the case?

Our whole goal with this hotel was to provide a smooth, luxurious and high-touch guest experience while still offering fully contactless stay options. That’s why we went with a combination of systems that tout their ability to automate tasks and reduce staffing requirements… If the points above are true, then it opens so many doors for oversight and errors that can really ruin our guests’ experience.

Hearing that we have to count on this many manual processes for a what seems like pretty fundamental info - not only for functional reasons but for security and liability reasons as well - is very concerning. So I hope the Mews team can help us figure out a way to manage this somehow (other than “you’ll just have to do it manually”).

I am currently trying to manage this with our onboarding manager (Saul) but I’m hoping that maybe having a few more brains from the community thinking about the problem might help find a solution.

THX

Helene

PS… I tried submitting this response the second & third time and it once again reloaded, erased my entire response and said “oops there way a problem!”. So this one is now submission 4. Luckily these last few times I copied my response to an external document before pressing send… But needless to say spending time writing comments only to have them disappear when you press send very likely frustrates users and leads to them not participate in the community. Hopefully the problem is on my end but you might want to look into why it has done that to me twice in a row.

Hi Ivan.

I posted a s fairly long reply to your response last night but it took me submitting it several times before it went finally through… however I’m still not seeing it here. Did you see it? Or should I repost it again?

Hi @Hel.L,

I just approved the previous post, it got stuck in “Pending” and needed an additional check by the community team 
Markéta

Hi Helene, 

Sorry to read it was not easy to post on the community. 

I’m Olivia a product manager in the guest experience team at Mews. We work on products like the Kiosk and the Guest Portal. 

I don’t have an immediate solution for your problem but wanted to give you some visibility on what we are working on. 

In our online check-in flow, we have a step to collect details from all companions on a reservation and assign them to the correct space. Today, this step is only shown if it is a legal requirement to collect details from all guests. This is not the case in Canada so it’s not applicable for your property. 

But we know this is something some properties would like to change as they need all guest details to give them digital access, for CRM purposes or security reasons for example.

We are already planning to change this and would let you decide if you want to collect info from everyone. The change will likely happen in the second half of this year. 

Hi Olivia.

You have no idea what a huge thing this would be for us and how many problems/stressors it would eliminate.

Thank you for providing this update, and for The Dover George… the second half of the year can’t come soon enough!

Helene