How small hotels can use technology to outpace chains

One of hospitality's common myths is that big hotel groups have the tech advantage. After all, they have the budget, the IT department and the data that independents can only dream of.  

But this story just creates excuses for small or boutique properties not to dream big. And it’s also, according to the latest episode of Matt Talks Hospitality, mostly wrong. 

Mews CEO, Matt Welle, sat down with Elise Roberts, Managing Director of Happiness Hospitality and the GM behind The Gallivant, a coastal boutique hotel in East Sussex that picked up a MICHELIN key and VisitEngland's Small Hotel of the Year.  

Elise has worked both sides of the size divide, from Hilton and Aviator through to running tech for a single, fiercely personal property. In her opinion: "Modern tech has given much more opportunity to independent hotels." 

The importance of intentional technology 

Big hotel groups are strong commercially, with loyalty data and repeat business often locked up tight. But under the hood, many of them are running newer tools bolted onto legacy cores – layered rather than unified. This creates a disconnect that can slow and limit the brand’s potential. 

An independent property doesn't carry that weight. "We can be more agile, we can be a bit scrappy, and we can try things and move on quickly if they don't work," Elise says. 

Shorter contracts help. Some vendors now run rolling 30-day terms, so a tool that isn't earning its place can be swapped out fast, without the multi-year lock-in that slows a bigger operator down. Unlike many systems used by bigger operators, Mews doesn’t charge connection fees for integrations, removing another barrier to agility. 

The Gallivant runs on 18 different solutions. For a small, seasonal, independently run boutique hotel, it feels like a lot. But every tool has a job, and every tool gets reviewed against two questions: does it add more value than it costs, in revenue, efficiency or better decisions, and will the team actually use it? 

"We just can't justify two weeks of classroom training to learn a new system," Elise says. Without an HR or training department to lean on, a system that a new starter can't largely teach themselves is a system that doesn't get chosen.  

That same discipline runs through the property's approach to iteration. When The Gallivant relaunched its restaurant, it priced the menu for the local market and, in doing so, narrowed its range so guests couldn't splash out on special occasions. Average spend took a hit, but the team caught it and they're correcting course. It's a small example of a bigger habit: try something, measure it, change it. In other words, "don't be afraid to fail." 

Fewer vendors, not more tools 

Specialist software can be important, but hotels shouldn’t collect them for their own sake. Yes, 18 tools is a lot, but Elise is actively folding standalone software into the core system whenever she can, because a connected operating system beats a stack of separately excellent parts.  

The hotel has already started using Mews RMS, powered by Atomize, and Mews POS. Next up: replacing a standalone yoga class booking app, and moving the hotel's membership subscriptions off Stripe and into Mews directly.  

"When I can bring more in under the Mews umbrella, that's actually makes Mews even more invaluable to us," she said. For an independent, every system that disappears into the core is one less integration to babysit and one less place for data to go stale.  

AI is doing the job of teams that small hotels don’t have 

If you're a hotelier weighing up your own AI investment, you can draw inspiration from Elise’s day-to-day use of it. She uses two tools for two different jobs. Firstly, a digital PA whose meeting transcriptions and notes free her up to be more present as a manager. Secondly, Claude helps on bigger projects, including running a full HR and payroll restructure that would otherwise have needed dedicated HR and finance support to pull off. 

Of course, this comes with the usual caveat: "Your AI is only going to be as good as you are and the information you're feeding it," Elise says. Dump in a pile of unstructured information and you'll get confident, wrong answers back. The properties getting real value from AI right now are the ones being deliberate about what they feed it and how they check what comes back. 

Borrowing a good idea and shipping it in weeks 

The clearest evidence of an independent moving faster than a chain came from the Gallivant’s owner, Harry. He'd seen a property in France running a simple trick on its booking engine: a pre-populated promo code offering a discount for booking direct, positioned to compete head-on with OTA "genius" pricing.  

Until then, the Gallivant had been stuck running a clunky manual workaround to match those OTA discounts. Once the team saw what that hotel had done, they worked directly with the Mews product team to set it up themselves. No procurement cycle, no waiting for a regional rollout. A chain with the same idea would likely need sign-off across multiple stakeholders before it reached a single property's booking page. It went live in a fraction of the time. 

The takeaway for independents 

None of this reads like a hotel making do with less. It's a hotel that's decided small size is an advantage, not a constraint, provided every tool is chosen with intent and reviewed intentionally.  

Big budgets buy scale – they don't automatically buy good decisions. For an independent property willing to be scrappy, iterate fast and stay honest about what its tech stack is actually doing for the team and the guest, the playing field looks a lot more level than the old story suggests. 

The full conversation, including Elise’s plans for The Gallivant's second property, is available on Matt Talks Hospitality, wherever you enjoy your podcasts. 

Watch the episode