Seven of White Rainbow's eight hotels now run on Mews, the eighth lands this month

White Rainbow, a small group of boutique hotels built mostly around the Adirondacks, has moved seven of its eight properties onto Mews, with the last one due before the end of October. For anyone running a handful of independent hotels on a handful of different systems, it is a useful look at what consolidating onto one stack actually involves.

The group was founded in 2020 by Yuri Bouharevich, who moved from Houston to the Adirondacks and started buying underused hotels in outdoor settings. Each one keeps its own identity, under the line "stay remarkable." One property sits in Montana, and the newest, the Grey Fox Inn in Stowe, Vermont, is expected to be live on Mews by the end of this month.

The problem White Rainbow describes is the familiar one. Every hotel arrived with its own system, so nobody could see the business as a whole. The team is also spread across properties and shifts, which means new staff need software they can pick up quickly rather than train on for weeks.

What they are running now:

• Mews PMS across the portfolio
• Mews RMS for pricing
• Flexkeeping, a Mews company, for housekeeping
• Keyless entry, connected through the Mews Marketplace, so guests arrive on their own schedule
• Custom automated reporting built on Mews data, used to check reservations, review occupancy and put pro formas together

That last one is the part worth noticing. Ethan Thomas, White Rainbow's Head of Development, says the value is that "every property sits on one system," which is what makes adding the next hotel a configuration job rather than a project. Bouharevich frames the operating side differently: "Every hotel we take on has its own story, and our job is to bring that out." Michael Coscetta, President of Mews, called the group "exactly the kind of independent operator we built Mews to support."

Where the release is thin

Mews puts its own scale at 15,000 customers across 85 countries. On White Rainbow it is less precise. The body of the release says the portfolio has seven properties, the boilerplate says eight hotels, and the migration count is given as seven of eight. The likeliest reading is eight hotels with Stowe still to come, but the release does not settle it.

There are also no numbers on what changed. No labour hours saved, no rate or occupancy movement, no cost. For a case study published several years into the relationship, that is a gap, and it is the thing an operator weighing the same move would most want to see.

What it means for operators

The trade-off here is not really Mews against another PMS. It is one vendor's stack against best of breed. White Rainbow has put the property management system, the revenue system and housekeeping with the same supplier, and Flexkeeping being a Mews company means the housekeeping integration is in-house rather than a partnership that could lapse. That buys fewer seams and one support contract. It also concentrates the risk, and it narrows the leverage you have when any one of those products stops keeping pace.

The keyless entry piece went through the Marketplace rather than being native, which is the pattern to expect. Mews supplies the core, and the hardware categories stay third party.

If you run several small properties on separate systems, the sequencing is the transferable part. Move the properties one at a time, keep each hotel's guest-facing identity separate from the back office, and build the reporting layer once the data is in one place rather than before.