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Mews

This page explains how the Mews plugin works within the EleaOpen project.

What is Mews?

Mews is a Property Management System (PMS) that lets you manage your hotels on multiple platforms such as Booking or Airbnb. Our clients use Mews as their PMS, and we developed this plugin to act as a bridge between Mews and the EleaOpen platform.

How the plugin works

The idea is simple: you install the plugin, configure it, and your EleaOpen account will automatically receive reservation information. This data is used to create, update or remove keys when needed.

We assume you won’t use this plugin from the very beginning of your customer registrations. By the time you configure it, you’ll probably already have many reservations in Mews.

To handle this, we added a Reservations Sync button. You’ll use it once to synchronize all existing reservations from Mews with EleaOpen.

After setup and syncing, you can forget about the plugin. It will keep running in the background, keeping everything up to date.

Installation and Configuration

To install and use the Mews Plugin, first install it via Marketplace:

  1. Click on the Marketplace navigation button on the left.
  2. Search for the Mews Plugin, click Install, then click Save.

Account configuration

  1. Click on My company, and at the bottom in the Installed plugins section find the Mews plugin. Click the settings button (gear icon).
  2. In the Mews plugin configuration panel, you’ll find 3 buttons, and only one of them will be accessible for now - Account settings. Click it.

  3. In Account settings you’ll find a field where you need to paste your Access token.

    Access token - a long string of characters and numbers you need to provide. You can get it by installing the EleaSoluciones plugin in the Mews Marketplace. On that page, find the key button and copy your Access token. It gives the EleaOpen platform access to your property information such as reservations, resources and customers. If you have more than one property, you need to ask Mews for Portfolio Access Tokens.

    Then decide if you want to change the reservation state from "To check in" to "Checked in" every time the guest opens the door for the first time, using Send first successful open event to Mews. If yes, enable this checkbox. By default, it’s enabled because this is the normal behavior.

    We also added a feature called "Auto‑update check‑in time for clean rooms" that, if enabled, updates the reservation keyring start time after cleaning. You can read more about this here.

    Use the Send pin information to Mews reservation checkbox to send the keyring PIN and open link to the notes of the Mews reservation.

    If Force check-in on the first open event enabled, EleaOpen will update the room status to "Inspected" before attempting check-in on the first open event, bypassing MEWS platform restrictions when the room is marked as dirty. Please make sure to configure your Enterprise tokens in the 'Enterprise tokens' section first.

    Finally, you need to choose the arrival and departure time for the reservation, which will be assigned to the keyring for every new reservation we receive.

  4. After that, click Save. If your Access token is correct, you’ll return to the plugin settings. You’ll see that Accommodation settings and Synchronize reservations buttons are now enabled.

At this point, the account configuration is complete, and you’re ready to configure your accommodations and then synchronize your existing reservations with Mews.

Accommodation configuration

Once you configure your account, you’ll probably want to link your apartments in Mews with groups in EleaOpen. To do this:

  1. Have or create groups with doors in EleaOpen.

  2. Go to Accommodation configuration and click Sync resources.

    Resource - an internal name in Mews used to describe different types of apartments, rooms or other options. In our case, Accommodation is equal to Resource.

  3. You’ll see a table with Resource and Group. Choose a group for every resource you want to use and click Save.

    By default, no resources have groups. This means that when you change a reservation in this resource and EleaOpen receives a notification, no changes will apply because the resource is not linked.

After linking resources with groups, the Mews plugin will start working. Every time you create, update or remove a reservation, EleaOpen will receive a notification via webhook and create, update or remove the corresponding keyring.

Enterprise Configuration

After setting up the accommodations and before starting synchronization, you need to enter all access tokens in the Enterprise Settings. This is required for the Send PIN Information to Mews Reservation and Force Check-In on the First Open Event features to work.

If you have only one hotel, the access token will be the same across the account. However, if you manage multiple hotels, you need to:

  • Paste the Multi-Property Access Token in Account Settings.

  • Use the regular access token for each hotel, which can be found in the Hotel Marketplace under the EleaSoluciones plugin, to configure the Enterprise settings.

Additionally, this section allows you to configure specific arrival and departure times for each hotel.

Synchronizing reservations for the first time

After the initial and accommodation configuration, you may want to import all existing reservations from Mews. This is why we have the Synchronize reservation button. After pressing it, you’ll see a window asking for the sync period. Check the latest reservation date and choose the period.

Example: If your latest reservation is in 8 months, choose 1 year. If it’s in 2.5 years, choose 3 years. You can choose 5 years, but it will make the page load longer.

SYNCRONIZE RESERVATIONSBUTTONMEWS APIELEAOPEN MEWSPLUGINKEYRING1KEYRING2KEYRING3RESOURCEHAS GROUPMEWS APIADD PININFORMATION ON CLICK SENDS REQUESTS RESPONSE WITH NEW DATA CHECKS CREATES UPDATES REMOVES

After syncing, you’ll see how many bookings were synchronized and how many new or updated keyrings were created.

The Mews documentation says that notifications about changes in reservations, resources or customers are generated in 2-5 minutes. If you don’t want to wait, you can use the Reservation sync button, but be aware: pressing it too often can temporarily pause your Access token for about 5 minutes due to too many requests.

How we process reservations

We have 3 cases:

  1. If we receive a new reservation, we simply create the keyring using the data from the reservation, except for the time, which you set manually in Account Settings or Enterprise settings, and send the PIN data to Mews as Service Order Notes and Resource access tokens, provided that the corresponding settings are enabled. The Service Order Notes are associated with the reservation, so you can see the PIN information on the reservation info page. Note that each new note replaces the previous ones, so only the latest note with the PIN information will be available. Inside EleaOpen we add a Confirmation Number for every keyring.

  2. If we receive an update of a reservation we have 2 subcases:

    2.1. If the guest name or reservation date has changed, we update these fields and do not change the pin.

    2.2. If the resource has changed, which means the guest changed their accommodation, we delete the keyring and create a new one. For us this update means a new reservation. We do this because the pin we send is associated with the resource, not the reservation. We need to regenerate the pin, and to do this we recreate the whole keyring and then send the new pin to Mews.

  3. If we receive a notification that a reservation is deleted, we remove the keyring.

If someone makes a reservation, updates it or cancels it

In this case the Mews plugin automatically receives a notification via webhook and processes it.

WEBHOOKELEAOPEN MEWSPLUGINKEYRING1KEYRING2KEYRING3RESOURCEHAS GROUPMEWS APIADD PININFORMATION SENDSNOTIFICATION ABOUTRESERVATION CHECKS CREATES UPDATES REMOVES

If guest opens the door for the first time

In this case if your checkbox "Send first successful open event to Mews" is enabled, our door via the EleaOpen platform and the Mews plugin will try to send this event to Mews and start the reservation. In practice this means that the reservation state will change from "To check in" to "Checked in".

From Mews documentation:

Marks a reservation as Started (= checked in). Succeeds only if all starting conditions are met (the reservation has the Confirmed state, does not have start set to future, has an inspected room assigned etc).

As you can see, one of the requirements is for the room to be in the Inspected state. However, there are many cases when this is not possible, and you may need to change the room state even if it is dirty. To address this, we added the Force Check-In on the First Open Event option in Account Settings. Enabling this option will automatically change the room state to Inspected and start the reservation. Note that this feature works only if the Access Token is configured on the Enterprise Settings page.

DOOR OPENELEAOPENMEWSPLUGINMEWS APICONDITIONSARE METRESERVATIONSTATE CHANGED SENDS NOTIFICATIONFIRST TIME SUCCESS OPEN SENDS NOTIFICATION SEND START RESERVATION CHECKS IF TRUE

If accommodation changes state to clean (or inspected)

Every 15 minutes, our system checks your Mews accommodations and, if a accommodation in the Mews system gets the status "Clean" or "Inspected", adjusts keyring activation time so guests can enter earlier when the room is ready.

  • This applies only to accounts with the setting enabled in Mews Account settings: "Auto‑update check‑in time for clean rooms".
  • We only consider reservations starting within the next 12 hours.
  • Keys never activate earlier than 09:30 on the check‑in day.
  • We only move activation earlier, we never move it later.

There are several scenarios:

  1. Cleaning finished before 09:30 on the check‑in day

    Result: Keys activate at 09:30 (not earlier).

    Example: Check‑in today, cleaning at 08:00, keys activate at 09:30 (6.5h earlier than a standard 16:00 check‑in).

  2. Cleaning finished after 09:30 on the check‑in day and earlier than the current activation time

    Result: Keys activate shortly after the cleaning time (within the 15‑minute check cycle).

    Example: Check‑in today, cleaning at 11:00, keys activate around 11:00 (5h earlier than 16:00).

  3. Cleaning finished earlier than 12 hours before check‑in

    Result: No change yet, the system will reconsider within the last 12 hours before check‑in.

    Example: Check‑in in a month, cleaning today - no changes now.

MEWSRESOURSECHANGE STATETO CLEAN OR INSPECTEDELEAOPENMEWSPLUGINSTATECHANGEDTO CLEAN OR INSPECTEDKEYRING SENDS NOTIFICATIONVIA WEBHOOK CHECKS EVERY 15 MINS UPDATES

You can access this information either on the EleaOpen platform under the keyring details or directly within the reservation on the Mews platform, provided that "Send PIN information to Mews reservation" is enabled in your Account Settings. Please note that each new note replaces the previous ones, so only the latest note containing the PIN information will be available. The old note with pin code and link will be deleted only if no changes have been made to it. None of your other notes will be affected or deleted, regardless of their content.

You need to install the EleaSoluciones plugin for each Hotel in Mews, copy the corresponding token, and paste it into our platform in Enterprise settings to use "Send PIN information to Mews reservation"

How to stop the plugin?

To stop the plugin, simply remove it from the "My Company" section. Once the plugin is deactivated, we will stop processing any data related to your hotels. However, we will keep your settings, reservation history, and keyrings. This means you can reinstall the plugin, sync your data, and resume use at any time. Please note that no reservation will be processed while the plugin is disabled.