We read who is in the building out of Mews and a guest signs in with their room number and surname. Of the systems here that have to be asked rather than telling us, Mews is the most straightforward to set up: two tokens, and one of them the property generates itself.
Mews is the property's own system. We connect to it; it is their product, not ours. mews.com ↗
On the interval you set — five minutes out of the box, and settable down to one — we ask Mews for the reservations covering the current window, and that becomes the list the sign-in page checks against.
The window is deliberately wider than today. A guest who checked in last week is still in the building, and a guest arriving tonight should be able to sign in from the lobby while their room is still being made up. Reading only today's arrivals would lock out both of them.
Mews keeps reservations and the people in them as separate records, so the guest's name takes a second question after the reservation itself — a reservation on its own carries a customer reference and no surname, and the surname is the one field that room-and-surname sign-in cannot do without. Which means a reservation in Mews with no surname on it is a guest who cannot sign in.
This system is asked rather than telling us — every five minutes out of the box, and as often as every minute if you want.
No rates, no folio, no card details and no passport numbers. Those belong at the front desk, not in a Wi-Fi portal.
A guest types their room number and their surname, and they are online. No email, no form, no questions, no consent box. Access ends at checkout plus the property's grace period, and wrong answers are cut off after five tries.
That is deliberate, and it is the whole argument for connecting a front-desk system at all. Your guest stood at your desk an hour ago and showed a passport. Asking them to prove themselves again to a web page, with an email address and a consent box, is an insult with a spinner on it. The details you learn about that guest come from the system that already knows them, and every session ties back to the booking you already hold.
A short list, and worth reading before you start.
What it costs. Carried by the Hotel plan, which includes one front-desk connection. What each plan includes →
Connecting Mews tells us who is staying. Your Wi-Fi equipment is what actually holds a guest at the sign-in page and lets them through afterwards — and whether a checkout can take somebody offline immediately depends on the make.
Forty makes, each with what it can do, what has to be true first, and whether checkout ends a session or the session runs to its time limit. The kit most hotels run: Aruba, Ruckus SmartZone, Cisco Meraki, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, TP-Link Omada, MikroTik, and the hotel gateways Nomadix and Antlabs InnGate.
What happens between a guest joining the Wi-Fi and reaching your welcome page, in plain English, with the technical section for whoever looks after the network.
The other front-desk systems, the Wi-Fi makes, the mailing tools and the CRMs — and the route for a system that will never have a named connector of its own.
Sign in with their room number and surname, checked against the in-house list held in Mews, and stay connected until they check out plus the grace period you set. No password, no email, no form.
Within a few minutes. Mews is asked on a schedule the property sets, five minutes by default, so a guest who checked in a moment ago may wait for the next check.
The in-house list: room number, surname, the reservation reference, departure date, nationality and language, where held. No rates, no folio, no card details and no passport numbers.
Carried by the Hotel plan, which includes one front-desk connection.
How many rooms, what Wi-Fi equipment is in the building, and whether anybody on site looks after the network. That is enough for a straight answer.
