Swapping lobby lines for revenue climbs: fixing the front desk

You’ve arrived at a hotel straight from your flight. The queue has ropes, as if you were back at the airport. By the time you reach the front desk, the receptionist can't find your booking. The confirmation number doesn't work in their system, and they don't accept contactless payment.  

Sound familiar? This is exactly what happened last month to Matt Welle, Mews CEO and host of Matt Talks Hospitality.  

Matt spent time as a front office manager at a large hotel about 20 years ago, running a DOS-based system on busy convention days with 400 to 600 check-ins. His view, having just lived through a painful arrival from the guest side, is that there's no excuse for it in 2026. 

Here's what he'd do differently if he were running that hotel today. 

The queue starts in housekeeping 

The afternoon surge doesn't start at the front desk. It starts hours earlier, when early arrivals are told their room isn't ready and asked to come back at 3pm. 

In most large hotels, housekeepers work from a printed sheet with no real-time prioritization and no visibility into which guests have actually left. Departure rooms and stay-overs get treated roughly the same. 

The fix: give housekeepers a mobile app that reprioritizes their task list as the day moves. Flexkeeping, part of Mews Operating System, does exactly this. When a guest checks out, that departure room moves to the top of the nearest housekeeper's list. 

Technology is one part of the equation; the other is culture. If every housekeeper returns four departure rooms before mid-morning, the property suddenly has inventory it didn't have before. That inventory lets front desk teams offer early check-in as a paid service – typically around €25 – rather than turning guests away. Most guests take it. The revenue adds up. And a meaningful share of that afternoon queue disappears because those guests are already in their rooms. 

Online check-in does most of the work before arrival 

The average hotel check-in takes around five minutes. Most of that time is admin: finding the booking, printing a registration card, taking payment details. The upsell, if it happens at all, is often an afterthought. 

Cloud-native systems move those steps online, before the guest arrives. With Mews, the moment a booking lands in the system, the guest gets an email to check in online. A reminder follows two days before arrival. Hotels that add an SMS reminder one day out see conversion increase noticeably. Mews SMS reminders led to a 25% engagement boost with online check-in, with a 164% ROI. In other words, people read their messages. 

The online check-in flow handles profile completion, room upgrade and ancillary upsells, and secure card tokenization. By the time the guest arrives, most of the work is already done. For properties without digital keys, the only remaining step is cutting a physical key card – seconds, not minutes. 

Hotels doing high-volume arrivals have the most to gain. Getting 25 to 40 percent of guests through online check-in before they walk in doesn't just speed things up for them. It means everyone still in the queue moves through faster too. 

Kiosks are more effective than you’d expect 

Many hoteliers are reluctant to lean too heavily on kiosks. The concern is that self-service feels impersonal. 

Yes, guests don't want impersonal service. But they also don't want to wait 30 minutes to get to their room. Those are different problems. What kiosks are particularly good at is consistency: they offer the upsell every time, to every guest, without the hesitation a human might feel at a busy desk. 

For hotels not ready to put kiosks front and center, place them in a quieter corner of the lobby and redirect traffic when the queue builds. For hotels that have leaned in fully, guests who completed online check-in before arrival skip straight to the key-cutting step. Everyone else moves through at their own pace without tying up a receptionist. 

The technology is ready – will hotels use it? 

Twenty years ago, there was one way to check in a hotel guest: at the front desk. The technology dictated the process. 

Today the constraint is decisions, not technology. Cloud-native systems mean the database is accessible from a phone, a kiosk, a tablet or a browser. The tools to shrink that queue exist and are deployed at scale. 

Matt’s hope is that more properties start treating the front desk queue as the operational and commercial problem it actually is.  

After all, first impressions matter. There's no reason in 2026 for a hotel of any size to still be running ropes at check-in. 

This article is based on a recent episode of Matt Talks Hospitality. Watch or listen to the episode in full wherever you get your podcasts. 

Watch the episode