Here some things in the handling with the kiosk that would be extremly helpful for us:

• Option to allow guests still to enter all information but disable the automatic checkin (to cater to that digital check-in-form handling we use).
• Option to set the kiosk timeout (time until it goes back to home) or to disable that completely
• Solution to register the kiosk similar to the printers so you could send an reservation via button to an kiosk (like the printer integrations) instead of entering all the information (name, number).

@MarketaOupi do you have any information about these kiosk options and what they do? Couldn’t find anything about that?

Hi @Jonas ,
 

We use the kiosk app in a similar way and alway use staff mode. This will allow your team to choose from all reservations instead of entering guest details to search for a reservation. Very helpful and saves time searching. Automatic space reallocation will automatically move a reservation to an available and inspected space if the original space is not cleaned yet.

Hope this helps!

@roy thanks . That‘s interesting because we have staff mode enabled and still cant chose reservations . It seems to have no effect at all for us. 

@jones.eth that's strange, the list of arriving reservations is showing right after we hit the check-in button. Maybe reach out to Mews Support to report a bug.

@Roy it is. I try to change this setting or create a new kiosk setup before reaching support . Until now i didnt even know this is possible … would be perfectly the way you describe it 🤩. 

We just got an new ipad today that i just copied from the current one. Do you know if you need to register each tablet individually? Right now it just seems to work with the current kiosk setup ‍♂️. 

@jones.eth I would reccommend to register each device seperately, we ran in some error messages when we used the same on multiple devices. We now have them seperate, also helps if you want to connect different Payment Terminals and/or Key Cutters per tablet.

Hi @jones.eth, thank you for raising these questions and sharing your feedback. 

Thank you @Roy for answering some of them

I’m the Product Manager at Mews that works on the Kiosk and will do my best to help with your questions.

Our problem is, that we can’t hand the tablet when the room is not clean already which would be great because the guests are waiting anyway (until the room is clean) and have time to complete the kiosk. When changing the room status we are not able to track if the room is ready or not … Any suggestions or workarounds for that?

I understand from this you’d like to still capture the guest’s details if the guest’s assigned room is not ready yet. Currently, this isn’t possible, but we have identified this as an improvement we’d like to add to the Kiosk in future. I’m afraid I don’t have a target timeframe for adding this at the moment. As Roy indicated, if you would like to, you could use the automatic space reallocation setting. This will then move the guest’s reservation to an inspected space within the same category. This lets the guest in front of you start their stay while housekeeping might still be working through the rooms to be cleaned.

Also in the kiosk settings in active options what is “employee mode” and “automatic space allocation” (we have german version, translation may be slightly different).

Roy already answered, but I’d like to expand on the employee mode part. This setting in Mews Operations allows you to disable staff mode on the Kiosk devices. If you were using a Kiosk in self check in mode, then it removes the risk of a device accidentally being left in Staff mode where guests could see the names of all arrivals that day. 

In terms of changing the app to staff mode, the steps to do this are in this help guide: The staff mode in Mews Kiosk. I’ve also shared the Setting up your Mews Kiosk help guide. Step 2 in this guide provides help with all the options in the Kiosk configuration page.

• Option to allow guests still to enter all information but disable the automatic checkin (to cater to that digital check-in-form handling we use).

Are you requesting this capability because you can’t currently capture details from guests when the room is not ready, or is there another reason behind this request you can please share?
 

• Option to set the kiosk timeout (time until it goes back to home) or to disable that completely

The timeout is configured to appear after inactivity; 1-minute in Guest mode and 3-minutes in Staff mode. Are you seeing that it is appearing sooner than this? If yes, there is a change in the next Kiosk release that we expect to help improve this as we found some user actions weren’t impacting this correctly.

• Solution to register the kiosk similar to the printers so you could send an reservation via button to an kiosk (like the printer integrations) instead of entering all the information (name, number).

I think the link to the Staff mode help guide could help with this, but please let me know if there’s another reason that you would like this sort of capability as I’m keen to understand more.

I hope this is helpful and I’m happy to help if you have any other questions or feedback.

James

Hey @James.taylor thanks for your extensive answer. First of all we really like the mews kiosk, it saves us a lot of time already. I think not much has to be changed to greatly expand the use cases the kiosk could handle.

Thanks for the info on staff mode, I just didn't know that. Sadly it doesn't really help us, because we hand the tablets to the guests so thats not an option.

We use the tablets as a kind of hybrid between a self-service station and employee mode... I would briefly explain how it works for us, but in short just think of a digital check-in form.

Normally, guests arrive and are seated while they wait for the room to be clean (of course, more happens here, but that's not important for this explanation). We use this time to fetch the missing guest data... we used to hand out printed check-in forms for this, but now we use the kiosk. The guests then return the tablet or we just pick it up. If the room is free, we check the guests in and they get their room keys.

I think that many comparable hotels have a similar process for this. There are several points on the kiosk that would make it much easier for us:

• Option to make the kiosk available even when the rooms are still dirty. The guest can then enter their information while they wait and at the end a message is displayed that the room is not yet free but the entered information has been saved. It would be cool if this message could be customized.
   
• Option to deactivate automatic check-in. When the guests have finished using the kiosk, the existing status "Online Check-In" could simply be given then or better a new status "Kiosk Check-In". For us this would be great because we still need to hand out the room key (not digital yet) and so we know the guests is still waiting but has completed the kiosk. Consider to let us customize the end message here too.
   
• Setting to set or deactivate the kiosk timeout. Especially if, like us, hand out the tablet (with the reservation open) to the guest, it should not close automatically at all.
   
• Simple way to open the reservation from Mews Operations (When staff mode is not an option). It would be cool if we could send a reservation to the kiosk just like payments to a terminal or documents to the printer.
   
• Not directly kiosk related but a “waiting for room” reservation status would be helpful too. You could create an option that when an room is cleaned while guest for that room are already waiting an notification is created. Depending if automatic check in status is enabled this notification goes to the guest se he knows he can complete the kiosk or the reception so they can complete the check in.

Hi @jones.eth, thank you for sharing much more detail and context for how you’re using the Kiosk. This is very helpful for me to understand.

If you have time, I’d be keen to speak with you further about some of the items you’ve requested and how they fit with your arrival process.

I’ll send you a link privately so we can coordinate a time if you’re interested to discuss further.

Thank you,

James