The Modern Hotelier #124: Helping Hoteliers Monetize the Full 24 Experience | with Richard Valtr
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David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. I'm your host, David Millili.

Steve Carran: I'm your co-host, Steve Carran.

Jon Bumhoffer: And I'm the producer, Jon Bumhoffer.

David Millili: Steve, who do we have on the program today?

Steve Carran: Yeah, David, today we have on everybody's friend in hospitality, Richard Valtr. Richard is the founder of Mews, an entrepreneur and ex-hotelier with an extensive background in hotel investment and management. Mews is a hospitality management system that is a platform for the new era of technology. Welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard Valtr: Hey, how are you guys doing?

David Millili: Good. Great, happy to have you here.

David Millili: All right, Richard. So we're going to start off, we're going to go through a couple sections. We're going to go through a lightning round, learn a little bit about your background and your career, and then jump into some industry topics. Sound good?

Richard Valtr: Yep.

David Millili: All right. So what was your first job?

Richard Valtr: My first ever job, uh, that was a bricklayer. Uh, my dad made me, uh, do it when I was kind of suspended from school for just, you know, doing really stupid stuff. And, uh, that's the first job that I remember. The other really, really annoying job was during my summer holidays coming back, and I'd have to do the graveyard shift 7pm to 7am on the reception desk always for about a good month or so of my summer holidays. Which is, like, where my general hatred for the night audit comes from.

David Millili: What's something you wish you were better at?

Richard Valtr: Speaking without using filler words.

David Millili: What’s a luxury you can’t live without?

Richard Valtr: A phone? A luxury? No. I guess it's actually subscription to all the different Substacks and all the different things that I end up reading. And an addiction to buying any kind of history books. Now I've kind of been banned in my house. If the Amazon package comes to the house, my wife just throws it away. Like, no more.

David Millili: A place you've never been to that you'd most like to go?

Richard Valtr: Uh, God, there's so many. I’d like to go to Hawaii, I’d really like to see it. There’s just so many places that I’d love to go. I’d love to go to Antarctica, I’d love to go to Egypt, but at the moment it feels like it’s Hawaii.

David Millili: All right, sounds good. If you had your own late-night talk show, who would you choose as your first guest?

Richard Valtr: Do they have to be alive?

David Millili: Ah, you can pick someone dead or alive, that's fine.

Richard Valtr: I mean, with a dead person it would be a pretty boring show, unless you're going to do the voices. But, um, alive, you could go like Barack Obama or like Elon Musk. But I think it's going to be this guy called Václav Smil, who's another fellow Czech that lives in Canada and writes all these really interesting books about really big topics, like the energy transformation and things like that. So I think he'd be really, really interesting to speak to. And dead? I don't speak French, but I'd love to interview Napoleon. Or like George Washington. Or actually, Madison, James Madison. I'd interview him and give him lots of constitutional questions.

David Millili: This is the last one for me in this section. If you had a time machine and you could go to the future or go to the past, which way are you going? And you have to pick a year that you go to. What year?

Richard Valtr: It's kind of, like, I feel like I'm primed for this answer just because of the fact that I was just on LinkedIn explaining why we, instead of our kind of mission, vision, and values, wrote a constitution. But I'd love to go to, you know, what is it, 1787, or 1780, and go to the Constitutional Convention, because nobody was allowed to take notes and things like that. I’d love to just sit through it.

David Millili: Good answer. I like that. Especially with this time, this time of year and what's going on in the States.

Steve Carran: Absolutely. Well, that was great, Richard. Great to hear those answers. Now we're going to get a little bit more into the personal side, where you grew up and what makes you tick. So you grew up in Prague, Czech Republic. Is that correct?

Richard Valtr: Yes, it is, even though I have this horrific speech impediment that makes me sound English.

Steve Carran: So how did growing up in Prague shape who you are today?

Richard Valtr: I don’t know, like, I feel that I definitely have this kind of English side to myself and a Czech side to myself. I really feel that all Eastern Europeans are predisposed to love America. That’s also one thing when I moved over here five years ago. But I think it is that thing of, you know, I was born still when it was Czechoslovakia, still under communism. Not to say that the first six years of my life were that memorable that I could really speak fluently on the difference between the two systems. But being so close to it does give you a perspective on what those two systems of government actually kind of are.

I think that whilst in Europe, there's been a bit of a fall from grace over the past 30 years, that's not really true in Eastern Europe, where it feels like we've just been growing through the last 20 or 30 years. I think that's kind of similar in the Western world. That’s also why the culture of growth, that I try and maintain within Mews, reflects what we try to see in terms of where we’d like to go. That definitely shapes me. I think having a very, very strong family life, being raised by two distinct personalities in my mother and my father, also makes me want to aspire to be as good of a father. My wife is a great mother, so she's, you know, that's difficult to compete with.

David Millili: All right. So you went to University College, London. How did you end up there? And what did you study when you were at university?
Richard Valtr: Uh, so I did philosophy and, uh, I also had history of science because I was really interested in it. Um, but, uh, yeah, I studied that. My father wanted me to become an actuary because he, uh, worked in insurance for pretty much all of his life. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I, I kind of, uh, my first thought was that I was going to become a writer when I was, uh, when I was older. And so I had all of these things that I was just interested in at the time. And so, yeah, I'd probably choose something different, but I feel like the idea of choosing the thing that you're going to do for the rest of your life at the age of 18 is like totally anachronistic. So, yeah.
Steve Carran: For sure, I agree. I think most of us would go back and change, to be honest with you.
Richard Valtr: I do like structural engineering now or something.
Steve Carran: Yeah, there you go. There you go. A whole different direction.
Richard Valtr: Like something really difficult and really like you need three years to do it. Like, I just feel like I actually get more out of reading philosophy books now than I definitely did then.
Steve Carran: Sure, sure, that makes sense. So, you know, you're in hospitality now. What makes you passionate about changing hospitality in today's day?
Richard Valtr: I think the two things that really drive me are, one, I just feel that this should be, and especially now that we're kind of entering the age of AI, hospitality should be the biggest industry on the planet. I mean, it already is a huge employer, and I think it should be a growth industry. It's kind of been one of these slow and steady ones. It's kind of always had good margins, relatively ekes out relatively okay growth all the time. But I think if you think about what it represents, the fact that it's this kind of apex of what real estate is, every single hotel is a mixed-use real estate site in itself.

And I think what we think of is the idea that when you come into a hotel, you as a guest are in someone's care. For a 24-hour period, currently hotels tend to only monetise that nine-hour period or the eight-hour, nine-hour period that somebody's in the room, and I just feel that there's so much that you can do there.

And I think that also there is so much scope to make other forms of real estate more hotel-like, whether it's offices, the idea of people wanting to segment themselves into memberships or communities or other forms of loyalty agglomerations. And then that coupled with the fact that experiences just seem to be more and more highly valued and seem to be one of those things that, as soon as anyone breaks out of the middle class, they just want to go and travel. And there's almost no ceiling for the amount of travel you will do the richer you get, as you kind of go up that curve.

So I feel from all of those things, if you think of everything to do with machines and AI as being fundamentally deflationary, because they will do all of those things themselves, then the human industry of hospitality should be kind of inflationary to balance it out because we should have more money from the kind of the drudgery in order to actually spend on experiences and things like that. So I think that's my bold case for hospitality. And I got really animated and really excited about making that happen.
David Millili: I was just watching some English gentleman on YouTube, and he was talking about how if the United States took the approach that Europe takes and mandating pretty much that you have four weeks of holiday, what a tremendous impact that would have on the economy and people changing their habits, spending more, and actually travelling more, whether it be, you know, especially within the country, obviously helping that economy. But that was, I thought, just a really...
Richard Valtr: What I think is really interesting is that, from the stats that we can see, Americans are definitely travelling more. They're travelling way more overseas, and you can see that in the passport numbers, basically. You can also see that in all of those things. So I think that whilst Americans don't like to take holidays as much as Europeans, I don't think that the amount of travel days is, you know, like, it seems to be exploding.

And I think it exploded during COVID, and the more times that we're able to actually work from anywhere, you know, whether it's working from anywhere or working from holiday, it feels like that more nomadic lifestyle is actually becoming completely normal. And again, what I think contributes to that bold case is that Americans have figured out how to have holidays even whilst they're not taking as many holiday days off.
David Millili: True.
Steve Carran: Agree, agree. Well, that's great. Now we're going to learn about a little bit more about industry insights and what's going on with Mews. So your dad was a programmer and hotel developer. Did that play a role in you starting Mews?
Richard Valtr: So it's actually my father was the programmer who then went to work for an insurance company. My mother was a sociologist, a PhD, who then became a hotel developer or property developer. So the kind of, you know, the mix is within me. I'm not sure if it also works out for the programming and sociology part, but it definitely works out for the programming and the hotel development.

So yeah, I think both of those things really, really kindled me, as I said, you know. Those experiences of being in and around hotels and working, especially on the front office, and really thinking about what is, then maybe it's a little bit of that kind of philosophy infusion into it, which is, you know, what is the actual work when you're at a hotel?

So I would always think about it from the perspective that I didn't understand why I was there working the graveyard shift when the actual work was, you know, welcoming the people at 7 pm or 8 pm when they were just arriving, welcoming them in, telling them more about the city, telling them more about the experiences, doing the kind of human work of hosting, which I think is really high-value, positive work.

And then just from midnight onwards, sitting there as a glorified security camera, doing, like, sitting and waiting for something to happen. Nothing would happen. And then clicking a couple of buttons and just waiting for the night audit to run. And I just feel like that is not human work. And that shouldn't need somebody to forgo seven hours of sleep or whatever it is during a fairly unnatural time.

I feel like there are so many jobs within hospitality that are just done because you're relying on cheap labour. We should try and completely do away with those and figure out what are technological solutions to those problems so that we can really focus on, you know, those four hours that you spend with those guests? How do you make them memorable? How do you make them truly positive? How do you make sure that the customer who's actually come into your hotel gets the most out of them, that you're upselling rather than, you know, telling them what time breakfast is, and where the elevators are, and doing those types of things?

So I feel it's, you know, changing those discussions, changing the purpose of what we actually have, and, you know, celebrating certain things which are endemic to hospitality, whether it's placemaking, the idea of hosting, the idea of curating experiences. Those, for me, feel like very high-value human jobs that humans are uniquely great at. You know, if you see somebody with your own eyes that's having a bad day, you can recognize it.

You don't need facial recognition or computer vision for it. Basically, it's something that humans can do. And the form of a human basically, like asking another person for help, it feels weird when we're kind of this thing, but like, those are real valuable services and real valuable people.

Resources that you're actually sharing with yourself. And I think we should figure out a way and a model to properly price those rather than thinking that it's just one service of a 12-hour shift, basically.
David Millili: That makes sense. So building off of that, what are some significant trends you're seeing with your customers? And how is Mews poised to really help them with these new trends?
Richard Valtr: I think there's so many different trends, like all the way from contactless, which, you know, became the thing during the pandemic. But I think it was very much kind of, you know, the whole industry was going in that direction. And I think it's mainly to do with the fact that we all have smartphones, and we all, you know, want to do things on our smartphones. We don't really actually kind of want to be configuring our trips, you know, through a conversation.

We want to just be able to kind of do that on our smartphones, you know, essentially kind of write down all of the instructions that we want, personalise that trip to the best of our abilities, and then just go from there. And I think, you know, that's something that Mews kind of started off with. We started off more as a guest management application. We only built the PMS basically because there was no system that had the extensive APIs that we were looking for.

But I think that that's really kind of one huge trend. The second is, I think, what I talked about before. We've always had these very strange architectural things in our system. So we don't look at the room or the folio that's attached to a room as the base of the system. We think of it as the customer themselves. And that leads into, you know, how you're then thinking about loyalty, how you're thinking about memberships and things like that.

And thinking that, you know, even a small hotel deserves to have its own loyalty scheme. So really having that kind of CRM-centric view is really, really important. And again, that's something that I think more and more hoteliers are really excited about. Then the third aspect is this idea of atomising all of the different spaces.

So if the room is no longer the kind of the charging unit, well, what is it? Well, it's actually part of that service. It's part of that 24-hour experience that you're doing. And so maybe in a one-star hotel, that is the only service that you can really kind of offer because you have no other services there.

But if you have a five-star hotel, you've got lots of different amenities that cover for x amount of hours. So you might think about it as a kind of 18-hour experience because you've got, you know, two hours for dining. You've got two hours as a gym, basically. You might also have a pool, which you might kind of laze out for three hours.

And that overall actually kind of makes that experience that you should be thinking about, you know, how to actually show that customer journey in a way that makes the most amount of money for the hotel, but also kind of creates those types of memorable experiences that you can have as a guest that then bind you to that place, that create that kind of loyalty, to come back.

And then when you extrapolate that over a brand perspective and you think about, well, how does that then play into a 365-day experience or, for example, into a lifetime of those types of connections? I think that's what we'd like to think about.

So, you know, we rolled out the idea of space time a couple of years ago. And what's interesting is that we always thought, oh, it'll be meeting rooms and things like that that are being kind of sold through it. The number one service that we see is, for example, parking.

So, you know, the amount of unused equity that is in hotels that can be monetised, that should be monetised, that, you know, even if you put a simple booking engine on your homepage, you know, just things start to get booked. I think that's amazing. And the fact that we've been able to create that more and more kind of incremental dollars for hotels, that's something that I'm incredibly proud of.

Those I would say are the biggest trends, but you know, you guys are the experts. So, like, there's probably 30 others that I'm not even kind of touching on.
Steve Carran: That was great. I mean, usually when we talk about trends, this comes up, which I'm going to ask you next. One of the biggest trends we've seen this year is AI. The industry is figuring out how to use it. How do you think AI, or how are you seeing AI impact the guest experience?
Richard Valtr: I think what's nice is that the one AI use case that most companies have figured out is the one that's used in just, you know, being able to access knowledge bases and be able to conversationally use it or conversationally respond.

And I think that when you think about, you know, so for example, we have an AI-powered chatbot for our hotel users because most of the time we were getting kind of how-to questions, you know, how do I do this in Mews? How do I do this? And when you just have somebody who can just respond to those types of questions and, you know, go five levels deep in a very nice conversational way, not in the old chatbot kind of style way of, you know, press one if you want this option or click on this, but it's just normal conversation.

I think that is a use case that I feel is pretty, pretty well worn. I think the next ones are going to be, you know, for us, it's, for example, the idea of being able to talk to reports or having reports talk to you.

I don't know if you've seen, but one of my favourite features that I discovered last week was, I think Google Notebook will create a podcast for you from every single PDF that you can upload to it. And so, if you prefer to, you know, learn things through the medium of interesting podcasts, which I think a lot of us do, it can just create a podcast with very believable voices narrating what is in that PDF if you just can't be bothered to read it.

And I just, like, it's all of these different use cases that I think are just really, really exciting and interesting. I can't wait to see where they go, but I think a lot of the conversational stuff on the guest side, a lot of the ways that we think of data, actioning that data, making sure that it's actually useful and kind of prompting everyone at the hotel.

We have this concept of user disengagement at Mews. So the idea is that, you know, don't make anyone sit in front of a screen. And so if you can deliver the kind of the prompt to, you know, what's the next best action basically to a receptionist, or what's the best way to kind of instantly recognise a guest, understand that they've, you know, been a loyalty member forever, that this isn't the first time that they're actually coming to your hotel.

Those are the holy grail moments that I feel like they're basically here, so we don't really need to wait that much longer. And there's going to be so many more of those things coming. But I just feel at this point, it's just, it's a huge acceleration for the productivity.

And the only bad thing is that, you know, once it gets let out of the bag, once you go to an AI-assisted hotel where essentially somebody is kind of using that co-pilot perspective, every other hotel experience will start feeling a little bit cheaper.
Steve Carran: Hmm. Sure. Absolutely.
David Millili: Great answer. So you started to touch on it before, you know, hotels, as you were saying, are kind of just so focused on heads in beds and room revenue. What else should they be doing to maximise revenue potential? And again, I know it's tough going from a two-star to a five-star, but maybe for that three- to four-star property. What are some things that you think they should be looking at doing?
Richard Valtr: I think the first thing that they should be actually doing is just asking their guests what they like doing, like even having a map of their own property.

So the way that I see it, like, a two-star hotel is never going to employ a huge legion of concierges the way that a five-star hotel might. But the idea of understanding why it is that people come to your hotel, what it is that they're trying to do there, are they just sleeping there because they have to catch a flight the next morning? Are they going there because it's a good halfway house? Do they like the pancakes at the next door's IHOP?

Whatever it is, I think it's shocking that hotels don't know. This is the role that they play within that 24-hour experience or 16-hour, you know, if those people are there for just one day, or 72-hour experience, you know?

And I think that the first part is really actually kind of understanding the data around what it is and why it is that cohorts of your customers are coming to your hotel. So being able to actually map out those customer journeys is the first part. And then thinking about, well, how can we, you know, play a role in the convenience of that experience?

You know, so if they're going to a local restaurant because it's got, you know, a local delicacy or something like that, is there a way that you can reserve a couple of tables there? Is there a way that you can guarantee that, you know, the...

I think people tend to go like, "Oh, everything should be tech." And I kind of go like, "No, like everything in hotels should be human first."

And then you should think about, you know, how can the tech help you scale it? But you should really be thinking about, okay, these fundamental things of, you know, we are a homepage or we are a place that somebody kind of has to come back to all the time.

If you think about it from a tech perspective, you know, when you click on that home button, you go there, what's the next button that you click? And I think hotels don't have this perspective to understand, well, what is the next thing that somebody is going to do once they click on that homepage, basically, and they come back, you know, to sleep or they come back to kind of, you know, have a shower in the middle of the day?

Understanding that journey and how we can be a little bit more helpful, how we can be a little bit more useful, that will actually create the most amount of monetisation moments for us.
Steve Carran: Agreed, 100%. So last question here from us, but Mews has had a heck of a year. You guys have had two rounds of funding. A few weeks ago, you guys just raised another 100 million. You've achieved unicorn status, three acquisitions, you held your fifth Mews Unfold. What is next for Mews?
Richard Valtr: The same. I like this, just like, I just feel like every single year it gets bigger, better, and I'm still as dissatisfied about where we are. And it is like, it's great. I feel like we're doing really good things, but I think that, you know, product needs to get better. We need to really, really understand how to drive real profit for our hotels.

I think that what we always think of is, you know, we want everyone to think of Mews as a competitive advantage. We want them to feel that they are in a collective or a community of people that care about this industry, that care about this industry becoming the biggest growth industry, that understand that they have a partner who's by their side, who's just as ambitious for their industry.

Because if we as a community can help grow this industry, then it means that everyone gets bigger, everyone gets better. So I just feel like there's so many different things that we can do, so many different ways that we can grow. So yeah, it'll be quite boring. It'll be more of the same, just bigger.
Steve Carran: I love that. I love that. So, we've been asking you questions this whole time. We're going to turn the tables and we're going to let you ask us a question.
Richard Valtr: Nice. So I'll ask, what is the difference between a hotelier and a modern hotelier?
Steve Carran: Great question. David, do you want to go or should I?
David Millili: Yeah, my interpretation is, I think if you are a modern hotelier, you're someone who embraces technology and doesn't fear it.

And I think that's what I've tried to preach to the industry, whether I'm talking to somebody at High Tech or I'm on an HSMAI panel. It's, you know, we kind of have this industry of fear. You said it great, and I agree with you, human touch first, human interaction, but how do you leverage technology to take away the mundane tasks, the night audits, all these things where, you know, I always use the example, I checked into a hotel in London, they had a self-serve kiosk, I just wanted to get to the bar.

I checked myself in, didn't interact with anybody, but when I got to the bar, I had a great conversation with the bartender and there were a couple of servers and that was great for me. And so that hotel had the trust in their employees versus fearing that the technology was going to take something away.

So to me, that's the embracing technology is what the modern hotelier is.
Steve Carran: I kind of, I'm on that same note. It's finding out being open to change and open to how you're going to increase the guest experience at the end of the day. Is that through technology or is that through more of a personal touch?

How can we incorporate more of these experiences into the stays? It is abundantly clear through all the studies that have been done that guests are looking more towards experiences with their hotel stays than anything.

We've seen this with, you know, people travelling to go see Taylor Swift in Europe, and that's their one vacation, and the economy in that city just skyrockets. So I think it's embracing kind of, I don't want to steal the whole technology thing, but embracing that new technology and really understanding your guests and how you can make the best experience possible for, like you said, whatever time they're in your hotel, whether that's one, two, three days.

So I think that's kind of my answer on that one.
Richard Valtr: Nice. But that was great. So last question on our end. Jon, our producer, has been listening the whole time. So we're going to ask, have him ask you one more question before we get you out of here.
Richard Valtr: So it's really cool to listen to you talk about how you're helping hoteliers kind of look toward the future and grab some of those opportunities to monetise like the full 24-hour experience and then that kind of dichotomy with what you're talking about at the beginning, your love for history.

Curious, is there anything that when you're reading history or biographies or whatever you like to read, is there anything that you've learned or taken from those that really impact how you're innovating or how you're thinking about what you're doing at Mews?
Richard Valtr: It's interesting. Like, it's always the last conversations that are the things that stick in your mind. But I was talking to somebody at Stripe, another kind of tech company. I was talking to the founders there, and we were just talking about how the only real analogy, and I don't know if it's a good analogy, but it really tends to stick from history as well.

How everyone has this vision of being like Alexander the Great, you know, you kind of come in, you've got this amazing piece of technology which was technically invented by his dad, but like, you know, the lances, and then you use that and you go over and like you basically kind of steamroll an entire continent. And you basically kind of do it, and you do it really quickly, and then that's it.

But that's not really how most companies are built. And that's not how, you know, there's a few, there's like OpenAI, which is, you know, those kinds of things like Facebook. And you have so many of those monumental shifts in either consumer behaviour or technology. But most of the time, most of the building process for a company is a grind.

And it feels like a long campaign or a long war in which you need to utilise all the different types of tactics, all the different types of ambushes. You need to go from guerrilla warfare in certain things to, you know, amassing a huge army, being able to kind of, to utilise it, like the end stages basically of the Second World War, when the Russians were kind of steamrolling through to Germany and things like that.

And those things. And it's just, it's interesting how that is, ends up, at least for me, being something that you tend to think of when you think about how to build a company and how to kind of think about the battles ahead whilst trying to win a war.
Steve Carran: Well, no, I was going to say, when Napoleon comes back from the dead and you have him on your talk show, you can learn right there and ask him from there. So...
Richard Valtr: Yeah.
David Millili: Great.
Richard Valtr: I'll be like, how did you do that at the Moravian Fields? That's... yeah. Okay.
David Millili: All right, so that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where, Richard, you get to let people know how they can connect with you, how they can find out more about Mews, so plug away.
Richard Valtr: So, Mews.com. So M-E-W-S, really confusingly, not M-U-S-E, but I'm sure Mews.com, uh, the other one is a fine site, but if you want to get in touch with us, it's M-E-W-S. And then I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. We're probably the most annoying company to ever follow on LinkedIn, but you can get in touch there or just Richard at Mews if you just want to randomly scream at me via email.
David Millili: Great. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Whether you're listening or watching, we thank you, and we'll see you again soon. Thank you, Richard.
Richard Valtr: Thanks so much.
Steve Carran: Thank you for having me.