The new paradigm of the hotel industry– Richard Valtr on the Mews success story

You have described yourself as a “recovering hotelier.” What are you trying to change about the hotel industry?

The main thing that we're trying to change is that most of the time, people are excited to work in the hospitality industry, and they often leave the industry feeling deflated, because the things that they enjoy doing, like meeting guests from all over the world and helping them to have a great time become secondary tasks. Instead, many staff in hospitality are overwhelmed with the administrative burden that comes with the job. ?

I know you and Matt from your pink suits. Can you tell us the story behind your suits?

The pink suit was a present to myself for my 35th birthday. I've always really liked the color, and for some reason, that then became the Mews color. Vic (our Creative Director) and I have always been the driving force around the brand and how the company looks, so we asked ourselves– "Can we incorporate this color into our brand?” ?

It became one of these things where we had a whole year of pink. I took my pink suit to a customer conference and since then we’ve been making variations, like boiler suits for our teams to wear at events and other branding based on that color. The year of the pink boilersuits also happened to coincide with the Barbie movie, and it all progressed from there.

I loved it because it was fun, but how does it relate to your brand? ?

There's no deeper meaning to the pink suits. It was just me liking the color and gifting myself the suit, and from there, it just had a life of its own.

But yeah, it was fun. It's one of those things that made the early days more fun. If you think about it, B2B sales can be boring, and the branding can be very generic. I feel like our central thesis has always been that hospitality is an “experience industry”. The systems might be boring in the way that you think about them, but it’s about the things that they can enable if they're used correctly. ?

We want you to use our system correctly. We want you to automate. We want you to do all of these different other things, so that most of what you're doing every single day is not, “Oh, how do I deal with this particular tech problem?” Or “How do I get this report into the hands of this other person?” But instead, “How do I focus on the guest?” “How do I focus on the messaging?” “How do I focus on every single Monday being a different type of vibe to a Thursday?” and “How do I greet my guest arriving on a Friday?” ?

We want to make it more about the entertainment of hospitality, rather than the boring basics of it, which is what most people spend their time on. The pink is a representation of that. ?

Can you tell us how you got here? This year, Mews just raised another $110 million… ?

I grew up in and around hotels and had all of these ideas about how modern hotels should run. And one of those ideas was how the software should work. When I had the opportunity to work on a hotel project with my family, I did the rounds of trying to look at software suppliers and found out who else was on the market, I couldn’t find anyone with the same perspective on automation and how these types of systems should work in the future. At the time, it felt like nobody else was working on solving this and nobody else had even a similar vision.

I got a bunch of developers together and fortuitously, Matt, our CEO, who was working at Hilton at the time, came on board. Once we were creating our first version of the system, I managed to persuade him to come and join. We’ve been plugging away, innovating, and growing ever since.

During the first couple of years, we struggled to raise money and we had to bootstrap everything. Then we raised a tiny bit of money to build a sales team and then we were able to go out and sell this thing. Slowly over time, things just got easier and easier to sell. More and more hotels started agreeing with our vision, and slowly we got to where we are now. And now, I feel like most investors look at us and see that we are the new paradigm of how hospitality should run, what it should look like, and what it should do.

You started back in 2012 in Prague, but moved to Amsterdam in 2016, why did you move?

We started the company in 2012. In 2016, we had to painstakingly move the company from Prague to Amsterdam because the only investor that we could convince to give us any kind of money didn't trust the Czech legal system, so they asked us to reincorporate the company in the Netherlands. So that was like six months of my life that I will never get back!

We raised a seed round in the Netherlands. Then, we raised our Series A mainly from an English investor called Notion and a few others. Then, we raised our Series B from an American investor called Battery Ventures in 2019 when I moved to the US. Then came COVID. During that time, we kept the company on an even keel, and then we ended up raising another round in 2022 followed by the round this year. ?

What was it like taking on legacy companies that were already providing back-end software for hotels?

It’s just like when you read these books for founders, like, ‘Zero to One.’ They always say – don't go into a knife fight. Try and go into undiscovered places. Well, this has been a knife fight from day one. It’s been the total opposite of what everyone tells you to do. I feel like we've always come at it from a totally different point of view. ?

We have a different idea about the end goal. Our goal is to automate as many of these different tasks in hotels and ensure that the humans in hospitality are doing human work. Great hospitality is run on human interactions, so we want to move data entry to the machines so that you're left with people who are providing experiences that are as heightened, and personalized, as possible.

That feels like the new paradigm of what should be created and that's what we're trying to do. All these other legacy providers are just doing the same thing that they've done for the last 20 or 30 years.

The result is a very complex product. How has it been dealing with this complexity and working out where to prioritize your efforts?

I think the complexity is reflected in the business that we serve, or the businesses that we serve because that's our job. The way we look at it is that we're serving these businesses or helping these businesses run. And so that then means that the system is going to be as complex as that business is. Hotels end up being quite complex. Our idea for hotels is that they're 24-hour experience machines. You go to them because there's a chunk of your human existence that requires a place like a hotel. You need eight or nine hours of sleep and somewhere to get ready for the day.

That's a very important service. But hotels have added several other services. They have a restaurant, a breakfast room, and a place to pick up a quick sandwich for lunch. They might have a swimming pool or a gym for your exercise needs and a coworking space for you to get a couple of hours of work done, and gradually you fill-up the 24 hours of your stay. These different services mean that the hotel business is complex. It’s like a small city within a city. ?

In terms of operations, you've got the back end, but you've also got what the guests see, right? And you're dealing with both sides. Optimizing for the guest is where Mews started. The first ever iteration was a website where you could put all your needs, and Mews would use that to create a special itinerary for you as a guest.

That's a product we're now bringing out with our guest portal. It's been a 12-year journey to reinvent our founding mission. But we've got a guest portal that essentially takes in all of these different requests and makes it very easy for guests to contact the hotel and speak to the hotel. That’s the kind of interface we want every single guest to have – a direct channel to the hotel. They don't need to phone someone; they can open their browser and access any service they need. ?

Do you think today’s guests are different from the hotel guests when you first started in 2012? Do they have different needs today? ?

I think they're similar. In 2012, one of the founding ideas was “Why would you ever pick up a phone and ring a reception desk?” And “Why do you need a reception desk when you've got your smartphone?” If that's the case, and if you can manage the entire stay yourself, “Why does that desk still exist?” And, if that desk is going to be there, and that person has to be there, then what's the added value of that person? Is it to handle the requests that are difficult to put into a chat? Or are they curators of the experience? Maybe they can offer recommendations for the customer, and it's more about the fusion of what technology, and especially AI, can do with hospitality. Guests’ needs have changed slightly, with hybrid travel, the need for long stays, and wanting a more well-rounded experience within a hotel, but ultimately, we’re still solving for similar challenges. ?

Now, touching on that topic, how do you think AI is going to transform the hospitality industry and your product? ?

To a certain extent, AI is nothing new. If you look at the relentless march of technology, it’s just another paradigm of automation. I also think it’s one of the reasons why people are traveling more than ever before. If you look at the trend line from 1990-2025, there's a huge rise in travel and people wanting to have more experiences in their lives. ?

It follows the same trend line that you see with tech and e-commerce especially. Weirdly enough, they’re correlated. Because I think the more tech we use, the more we can sit at home and do our jobs, the more traveling becomes a reward. Meeting people is part of that reward as well. ?

I think AI is going to make it easier to get to know somebody. It's going to make it easier to personalize a journey. It's going to make it easy to have a wider scope of services to offer. Suddenly, you can pre-allocate the connection points. Whereas before you had to speak to the concierge, and they would plan out dinner reservations for you.

This task can now be automated thanks to these interconnected systems. A smart AI could book the right kind of taxi at the right time, and make sure that you're sitting in the right area within the restaurant so that you can enjoy it fully. It's going to kind of look after you so that when you need to leave and go back to the hotel, it will have a car ready for you there as well. This is something that you would not have been able to offer at scale with one concierge. But with technology, and with AI, it's going to make it easy to offer that kind of service.

What gets you up in the morning? What gets you excited about life?

What gets me up in the morning is my children at 6 am most days, in all honesty. But what gets me going in the morning is that I truly believe in the hospitality industry. It's an important industry for humanity because it’s something we can offer each other. We can all create interesting experiences for one another. And I think humans really like sharing. They like sharing their point of view. We all want to know a good restaurant or a good place to visit, and we appreciate recommendations from others. People like cooking for each other. People like taking care of each other, especially guests. To a certain extent, that's been relegated in society to “support roles”. It is important to view it as valuable work. ?

We need to professionalize the idea of experience, creation, and curation, or care more broadly. This is going to be a really important part of the 21st century. When I think of hospitality, I think of the days that you spend on holiday. Those are going to be some of the most memorable days that you have every single year. So why not make every day like that? If we could facilitate the creation of a system that helps people to experience these joys in life, no matter where they live or no matter what they do, to have this holiday feeling about every aspect of their lives, I think the world would be a better place.

What do you want to do more of both in your job, but also, personally?

I want to have more time to think. Fewer calls, fewer off-the-cuff conversations, less feeling like I’m always in a rush, and instead, more ability to think deeply about things. What the hospitality industry represents, in my mind, is a good form of capitalism and a good form of exchange of value in the world. I have something, or I represent something, I'm going to sell it to you for a price, and you're going to buy it, but you're going to feel that it was worth it because you got something out of it. So, it's kind of like a 1+1=3 scenario. It's not extractive, it's not like advertising, where all you're doing is pushing something onto someone whether they want it or not. ?

Finally, what would you like your impact to be on the world?

Creating more of a growth-orientated perspective in which we can create more value together as a society. Then, we can take care of ourselves. I think what hospitality does and that's what technology is supposed to do. That's what I'd like my impact to be.

Thank you so very much for your time.

Thank you! ?