What the provider describes
- Mews Operations documents hotel reservations, billing, front-office work and reporting.
- Its serviced-apartment offering addresses longer stays and flexible billing arrangements.
- Mews Payments covers payment collection and settlement workflows, subject to regional scope.
- The Marketplace connects additional hospitality services.
- Its go-live guidance separately addresses occupied stays, balances, room status and availability blocks.
- Mews Operations product scope
- Mews Payments and regional scope
- Mews Marketplace
- Serviced apartments
- Preparing a PMS go-live
- Property-specific pricing
- POS country availability
Start with your operating model
Room count alone is a poor guide to complexity. A small property can have corporate payers, monthly stays, restaurant charges and several revenue categories. A larger aparthotel can run a comparatively straightforward stay workflow with one operations team. Start with the transactions and handoffs that create work: who holds the booking, who owes each charge, who approves a room move and who releases a room for arrival. Bring those cases to Sixto and Mews. Choose the operating model you can demonstrate and support, rather than adopting hotel-system complexity merely because it is available.
A hotel PMS can be a financial operating model
Mews is relevant when the hotel’s complexity lives in the relationships among stays, charges, payers and departments. A room can be occupied by one person, paid partly by a company and associated with extras handled elsewhere in the property. The important capability is preserving a coherent account as those relationships change. Our assessment is that this can justify a deeper hotel system even in a relatively small building. The tradeoff is organizational: configuration, finance ownership and training become part of the implementation. A richer model creates little value if staff cannot explain how an exception changes the guest balance.
Sixto’s comparison starts with Colombian operating work
For a Colombian aparthotel, the hardest problem may instead be getting the same arrival information to the people who need it and completing the work attached to the stay. Sixto is worth evaluating when that coordination is the core requirement. The decision should not presume that every hotel-finance or restaurant scenario has an equivalent Sixto workflow. Likewise, Mews’ broad product scope should not be mistaken for ready-to-use local services in every country. A credible proposal connects the property’s operating requirements to the available configuration, accountable people and any services that must remain outside the main system.
An occupied-property cutover is a finance event
Changing a hotel PMS while guests remain in house creates an overlap between two records of the business. The new system needs usable operational data, but the old system may still explain deposits, previous charges or documents already issued. That makes migration a shared responsibility between front office and finance, rather than a technical import alone. A staged plan can preserve historical evidence while assigning each open stay to a clear checkout and payment process. The cost of this work belongs in the comparison. The most convincing pilot proves both that a room can be sold correctly and that its final account can be reconciled.
Questions to take to a demonstration
Use real cases from your property. A successful demonstration should show the result, the person responsible and what happens when a step fails.
Can the system represent what you actually sell?
List rooms, apartments, combined units and any separately bookable services. Add a corporate stay extended twice and a reservation moved to another room mid-stay. Ask how availability, rate changes and the guest’s bill stay consistent. Mews describes an extended-stay use case; validate the configuration against your own contracts. In Sixto, test the actual supported unit and reservation workflow rather than assuming parity with every hotel space model. A proposed workaround deserves an owner, a time estimate and an explicit acceptance decision.
Who owes each charge, and who can change it?
Use a stay where an employer pays the room, the guest pays extras and a deposit must be applied at checkout. Ask reception to correct a charge without hiding the original event, then ask finance to reconcile the result. Mews documents hotel billing and accounting categories; the useful test is whether your staff can follow the complete transaction. Require the same clarity in Sixto’s available workflow. Distinguish a guest statement, a tax document, a payment transaction and the settlement received in the bank.
What changes when the guest is already in the building?
A future-booking import is not the whole migration. Prepare a cutover list of occupied rooms, out-of-order inventory, unpaid balances, deposits and departures on the switch date. Mews specifically warns that availability blocks are not transferred with reservation imports. Rebuild and verify such restrictions before reopening sales. Give front office and finance a shared sign-off sheet, and agree where a guest already in house will check out. Do not assume importing a reservation has transferred every operational or financial responsibility attached to it.
Will housekeeping and reception agree on room readiness?
Run a same-day departure and arrival, a room move, a maintenance hold and a cleaning task that cannot be completed on time. Ask who can change status, how reception learns about the delay and what remains visible after a shift handover. Examine the housekeeping product or connection included in the actual Mews proposal, not an unrelated demonstration module. In Sixto, show the assigned work and the context staff use to resolve it. Approve the process only when the next person can understand the exception without repeating the whole conversation.
Which country services are genuinely available to your entity?
Confirm the PMS, acquiring and settlement, terminal hardware, POS and statutory connections independently. A product’s presence in one country does not prove that every module is sold or supported there. For a Colombian property, request the exact SIRE, TRA and DIAN route and its production prerequisites. A general invoice or a list of payment currencies is not sufficient evidence. For Sixto, review the enabled local workflow, permissions and credentials. For an operation outside Colombia, do not treat Sixto as an available international rollout until country onboarding is explicitly supported.
Who resolves an integration failure at the worst moment?
Select the channel connection, door-access service, accounting export and any restaurant integration needed for your property. For each, name the contracting party, configuration owner and support contact. Simulate a delayed update or rejected transaction and ask where the failure appears and who retries it. Mews publishes a Marketplace, but the presence of a listing is only the start of a scope check. Compare the total number of handoffs in both proposals, including any work your own team must perform when two suppliers each consider the other responsible.
How do payment terms affect the real commercial decision?
Request a written proposal using the same legal entity, rooms, transaction mix and settlement assumptions. Separate software, implementation, connected modules, payment processing, hardware and any premium support. Ask about minimum commitments, renewal changes, refunds, chargebacks and exit exports. Mews describes embedded payments, so include finance in the evaluation before treating the software quote as the full cost. Do not assume that existing card credentials can move to a new provider. Require a documented arrangement for future charges and guests with payments already collected.
What is the acceptance test for choosing Sixto or Mews?
Run one ordinary stay and one deliberately difficult stay from reservation to reconciled checkout. Have reception, housekeeping and finance use their own permissions and working languages. Prefer Sixto when the Colombian shared workflow solves the important handoffs and the remaining requirements fit its demonstrated scope. Keep or choose Mews when the hotel’s billing, departmental or integration requirements make its operating model the better match. Before switching, approve balance reconciliation, inventory checks, guest communication and a named rollback decision-maker. A successful demonstration is evidence for a pilot, not a reason to skip cutover controls.
Before changing a system
- List upcoming reservations, physical units, guest balances and the channels that publish availability.
- Agree on the system of record and test changes with one property before a wider move.
- Export and reconcile guest records and reporting evidence. Define a rollback owner before switching channel control.