8 mins read • Mews Property Management System (PMS)
My Role
Product Designer – Interaction, UI design, prototyping, user testing, project scoping
Team
Product Manager
Engineering team
Content Designer
Timeline
Dec 2023 – Jun 2024
Overview
Loyalty programmes are ubiquitous in the hotel industry, playing a vital role in enhancing guest satisfaction. For front office agents, managing loyalty tasks directly within the Property Management System (PMS)—the core software for operations like check-in, invoicing, and check-out—is essential. However, Mews PMS lacked this feature, missing an opportunity to serve enterprise hotel brands that prioritise loyalty programmes. Staff often had to switch systems to identify members or enrol new guests, causing inefficiencies.
The project aimed to seamlessly integrate hotel loyalty programmes into Mews PMS. I designed an end-to-end journey to help front office agents look up existing members, enrol new guests, and identify loyalty members. Despite tight deadlines and an initial reactive approach driven by enterprise hotel feature requests, I utilised effective research methods and an iterative design process to deliver a well-rounded solution.
The project was successfully launched achieving high lookup and enrolment success rates (90.6% and 80%, respectively). More importantly, it secured partnerships with two enterprise clients, BestWestern and Strawberry. Additionally, it played a crucial role in scaling the Mews Property Management System (PMS) to meet the needs of enterprise hotels, driving increased adoption and attracting new enterprise clients.
Design highlight
Seamlessly integrate hotel loyalty programmes into Mews PMS
Context
Before delving further
What does Mews do?
Cloud-Based PMS for hotel operations
Mews is a European hospitality tech company offering a cloud-based Property Management System (PMS) for hotels, along with guest-facing and financial services. With over 5,000 hotels using Mews, it streamlines daily operations, automating tasks like reservations, check-ins, and billing.
Designed for front office staff, the platform scales from small and medium-sized hotels to enterprise hotel brands, enabling staff to focus on service rather than administration.
As the business scaled, the company prioritised enterprise hotels and realised there were hurdles we needed to overcome.
Image source: Mews.com
Problem
Inefficient management of loyalty programmes in the property management system
Enterprise hotels rely heavily on loyalty programme to drive guest retention, but front office agents struggled to identify loyalty members within the PMS.
This led to inefficiencies in servicing loyalty members, difficulties in tracking their feedback and points claims, and challenges in enrolling new guests into loyalty programmes.
Challenge
Fragmented systems in hospitality operation
Multiple systems used in hospitality lead front office agents to only access fragmented information. It’s necessary to have a holistic understanding of the entire ecosystem and design scalable solutions for large brands like Best Western, with 4,300 global hotels, to avoid costly custom development and address data integration challenges.
Process
How did I overcame obstacles to create effective solutions?
Understand and clarify feature requests
Reviewing over 100 feature requests, packed with complex business logic and technical details, can be overwhelming. However, it helped me identify limitations and requirements early in the process. I’ve also flagged key items and contacted hotels for clarification to better address their needs.
Identify user pain points and draw a storyboard
I gathered available resources to create a comprehensive user journey map, outlining processes from recognising members to serving them based on their tiers.
Additionally, I identified overlooked steps, such as challenges in recognising guests, and storyboarded key pain points to address gaps in the user experience, sharing them with the team to better emphasise.
Conceptualise and validate the proof of concept
Based on the findings, I designed key screens and flows to help front office agents manage loyalty memberships alongside their regular tasks, ensuring seamless integration to minimise the learning curve. High-level prototypes were shared with internal and external stakeholders for feedback. Hotels valued the chance to contribute, while the internal team identified key technology considerations early on.
Define the scope according to the design
I created an impact effort matrix to prioritise features and divided them into phases.
Phase 1 focused on must-have functionalities requested by hotels, such as the lookup and enrolment flow, while Phase 2 aimed to enhance the membership experience by equipping front office agents with tools to efficiently identify guests.
Future collaboration with the financial infrastructure team was planned to enable guests to pay with loyalty points.
Design solutions
Empower front office agents to manage loyalty membership alongside daily tasks
Ensure seamless integration that enhances user experience
Lookup
Checking whether a new guest is an existing loyalty member when creating a reservation
Enrolment
Enrolling guests in the loyalty programmes when updating their profiles
Identification
Identifying loyalty members when reviewing guest reports
Behind the happy paths
Multiple scenarios to consider
Apart from the happy cases in the lookup flow, I’ve also considered others, like handling no matches, system errors, or too many results, and addressed them with robust UIs. To ensure clear, user-guiding messages, I collaborated closely with the content designer.
Similar to the lookup flow, the enrolment process involves numerous corner cases, such as missing guest information or duplicate enrolments. To address these, I designed interactions tailored to each scenario. For instance, an error dialog is displayed when an error occurs after submitting results to the database, while inline error messages are used for front-end validation issues.
Test and validate
Are we going in the right direction?
Conduct unmoderated testing for front office agent feedback
I regularly checked in with hotels for feedback, but most comes from headquarters staff designing the loyalty programmes. To gather input from real users—front office agents—I used unmoderated testing on Useberry. Hotel contacts shared the testing link with their front office community, receiving nearly 100 responses in a week. This provided valuable feedback for immediate design iterations and future projects.
One of the changes informed by the testing
Customer loyalty programme tier display
Initially, only the hotel’s loyalty programme was shown, but feedback from front office agents highlighted the need to display all loyalty programmes, including partner programmes, to better serve guests. I updated the design to show the primary programme while collapsing the rest, with an option to view all via a popover.
Results
Launched and scaled the product for enterprise hotel brands
After six months of dedicated effort, we launched the project, successfully onboarding four Best Western hotels and completing the rollout for 230 Strawberry hotels by October 2024.
In addition to the successful launch, Mews announced that the product now supports enterprise hotel brands, including features to manage loyalty programme memberships within the Mews Property Management System.
We also observed highly positive data captured by October 2024.
90.6%
Lookup success rate
Success of lookup functionality
80%
Enrolment success rate
Effective enrolment process
+2
Enterprise partnerships
Increased market adoption
+1
Enterprise prospect
Expansion opportunities
Learnings
Drive design for the best experience
While working with enterprise hotel brands, I focused on delivering a clear user experience, not just adding features. When clients referenced other providers, I explained why my design was the best fit. Because I’m able to balanced user needs with business goals to ensure alignment.
Bear with imperfections and pitch them later for priority
With limited time and resources, I prioritised key project goals to qualify for enterprise partnerships. I flagged improvements like the Profile Match and Merge* process, pitched it to leadership, and it has been an ongoing project.
*The previous process was error-prone, causing missed loyalty point claims and hotel complaints.