Mews RMS can now price a room on what the guest spends everywhere else

Mews has added ancillary revenue estimates to Mews RMS. The idea is simple and long overdue: if a guest reliably spends 40 euros in your restaurant, the rate recommendation for that room should know it.

Revenue management systems have historically optimised room revenue because room revenue is the number the PMS holds cleanly. Everything else, the spa, the bar, the dinner, sits in other systems or other reports, and the RMS prices as though the room were the whole transaction. For a resort or a property with real food and beverage volume, that has always been a distorted picture.

How it works

You configure the estimates yourself. Mews lets you record expected spend per adult and per child, either daily or per stay, for guests on dynamically optimised rates. Those estimates feed into the rate recommendation, so the suggested price reflects what Mews calls the property's total revenue potential rather than room revenue alone.

Estimates can vary by season. You can apply different figures using custom date ranges, or use your existing price hierarchy rather than building a parallel structure.

Mews published this as a new feature on 14 September.

The catch, and it is a real one

These are estimates you type in. They are not measured from your point of sale data.

That matters more than it might sound. The whole value of the feature depends on the quality of a number that comes out of your own head, and the failure mode is specific: overstate ancillary spend and the system will happily recommend discounting rooms to win bookings that were supposed to pay for themselves at the bar. If that spend does not materialise, you have sold cheap rooms and told yourself a story about why.

So the discipline here is to derive the estimates from actual POS data before entering them, and then to check them. Pull last season's food and beverage revenue, divide by covered room nights, segment it if your mix varies, and use that. Then revisit after a quarter and compare what you assumed against what the till says.

Segment differences are where this gets interesting and risky. A corporate guest on a weekday and a family on a summer weekend do not spend the same way, and the feature works per adult and per child on dynamically optimised rates rather than per segment or per rate plan. If your ancillary spend varies sharply by who is staying, a single blended estimate will be wrong in both directions at once.

What Mews has not said

The release does not state which plans or packages include this. It requires Mews RMS, which is a separate product from Mews Operations, so properties not on the RMS get nothing here. No regional limitation is mentioned.

There is also no published validation. Mews has not shown a back-test, a pilot property or any figure on how recommendations changed when ancillary estimates were switched on. For a change that directly moves the price you charge, that absence is worth noting. Ask your account contact whether anyone has run this in parallel with the previous recommendations and what the delta looked like.

Worth doing anyway

None of that is an argument against the feature. Pricing rooms while ignoring half the revenue was always the wrong model, and a manual estimate that is roughly right beats a system that assumes ancillary spend is zero.

Just treat the estimate as a number you own and maintain, not a setting you fill in once.