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About The Old Stocks Inn
The Old Stocks Inn is a small boutique hotel nestled in the picturesque Cotswolds in the UK. The hotel is ideal for escaping to the countryside, and combines traditional British style – it’s a grade two listed building – with sophisticated Scandinavian interior design. It’s 6,000 yearly guests can also enjoy a restaurant, bar, café, and a stand-alone on-site country cottage.
The hotel needed more flexibility across all areas of their operations, and wanted to find an intuitive, easy to learn hospitality cloud that would improve the guest experience and drive more direct bookings, as well as generate more income through ADR or upselling.
An online onboarding in just three weeks
Pain
Implementing a new PMS can typically take months.
Solution
Mews onboarding was done entirely remotely, with a comprehensive roll-out plan in place that was adapted to the property's requirements.
Result
• Implementation took only three weeks
• Open line of communication to keep things on track
A seamless guest experience with Mews Guest Journey
Pain
Guests expect a more personalized experience, embracing modern technology. Moreover, too many bookings were being made through OTAs, reducing the hotel's revenue.
Solution
Online check-in captures guest information before arrival, reducing reception queues and allowing hotel staff to engage more meaningfully with guests. Many guests now use the virtual concierge to contact the hotel, making it easy for staff to answer questions from a centralized area.
Switching to Mews Booking Engine increased guest conversion on the Old Stock’s Inn website, and helped to generate additional revenue through upselling. Products with descriptions and pictures can be added to appear in the user journey before purchasing, and extras such as late check-outs and flower bouquets are now available for guests.
Result
• 70% of guests use online check-in
• 8% increase in website conversion
“The lovely thing is that the people employed to actually talk to guests can now talk to guests, which is what they should be doing, as opposed to just pushing buttons on a card machine.”
Truly flexible pricing boosts ADR
Pain
Amending room rates was an arduous manual task, which made it hard to the hotel to be agile.
Solution
Mews Revenue Management lets you easily amend room rates by type, so that rates for a group of rooms automatically move by a pre-set amount, while parent-child functionality connects relevant units and makes it easy to manage reservations. Mews also allowed the hotel to introduce pre-paid rates, improving cashflow at only a nominal discount for guests.
Result
• 8% increase in ADR in first two months
• On average, two or three extra rooms are now sold on weekends, at up to £50 extra per room, per night
“I got around £10 average rate growth in the first two months just by having the ability to flex rates in such an easy way. With Mews, it was just very simple, very easy.”
Embracing digital process saves time
Pain
Manual tasks often slow down operations across multiple departments and cause physical waste.
Solution
Mews Reservation Management means the front desk and reservations team can process phone bookings more quickly and confidently because only available rate and promotion codes are shown in the reservations screen. The maintenance team log every task within Mews, meaning they can quickly access their to-do list as well as easily update when tasks have been completed.
The management team have benefited from Mews Analytics’ deep level of reporting, conducting analysis for customized market segments around lead time, purchase habits and more.
Result
• No more needless printouts for the housekeeping and maintenance teams
• Significant time savings for all departments
“I really like the ability to plug in apps and the open API approach. Having that choice of the marketplace is a big thing for me – you’re not locked into products that your PMS provides, but can choose from the best in class and pick which ones fit your business.”
Integration spotlight
The Old Stocks Inn use a number of integrations, from a channel manager to a printer connection.
Oaky
Oaky is an upselling tool that makes it easy for properties to generate additional revenue. By using Oaky, The Old Stocks Inn have seen a ROI of between 10–12x for selling add-on and ancillary products. Previously, the hotel only had a small physical shop on site that generated no more than £3,000 every year. Now, yearly online sales through the Oaky integration are £12,500, an increase in revenue of more than 400%.
Looking ahead
The Old Stocks Inn will continue their quest to understand guests and potential customers even better, by capturing and analyzing more and more customer data. The next step will be trialling a CRM (customer relationship management) tool, connected through the Mews Marketplace.
