Mews’ product team in charge of our Point of Sales (POS) system—the software restaurants use to take orders and process payments—went to visit one of our hotel clients, CoolRooms Palacio de Atocha, and had follow-up conversations with the team at CoolRooms Palacio de Villapanés in Sevilla. The plan was simple: understand workflows, identify pain points, validate our assumptions about how food and beverage staff work.
Instead, we spent two days getting schooled by hospitality pros who had figured out workarounds we’d never thought of, followed by conversations with the Palacio de Villapanés team that revealed even more complexity. Our assumptions got turned upside down, and we ended up in an all-day workshop session that nobody wanted to leave because ideas kept flowing and everyone was excited to build on each other’s thoughts nonstop.
It turns out that our POS works really well for boutique properties. But we also learned exactly where we’re screwing up and how our users have had to become creative problem-solvers to make our system fit better for their workflows.
CoolRooms Hotels is a collection of luxury boutique properties recognized for their architectural heritage, personalized service, and commitment to excellence.
Getting the Full Picture
The conversations with both Palacio de Atocha and Palacio de Villapanés teams opened our eyes to something we hadn’t fully grasped: POS problems don’t stay contained within the restaurant. They cascade through the entire hotel operation in ways that can make or break the guest experience.
The Palacio de Villapanés GM, Jesús Bonilla, described their 17-hour operational day (7 AM to midnight) and how a single system failure impacts everything: “When the system goes down, we have no way to charge, no way to charge rooms, because everything is connected.” They’ve only experienced a complete system failure once in five years, but the manager’s description was telling: “It was chaos, because we had to get manual authorization from clients to have their data on paper.”
We learned that when restaurant staff need to cancel an order, they have to rebuild it from scratch, entering every item again. This doesn’t just slow down the restaurant—it creates a domino effect. Delayed orders affect kitchen timing, which impacts table turnover, which influences room service delivery, which ultimately affects guest satisfaction.
“We’re a five-star luxury hotel and we can’t afford to have paper tickets,” the staff explained. As a luxury property, even small operational inefficiencies become magnified because guest expectations are so high. What seems like a minor software limitation in our POS becomes a brand reputation issue when it happens in front of discerning guests.
This taught us that we need to think beyond individual features and consider how every POS interaction connects to the broader hospitality ecosystem.
The Masters at Work
Within an hour, we realized we were watching something impressive. Alejandro Alberola, Second Maître at CoolRooms Palacio de Atocha, took all the different types of orders during lunch rush without writing anything down. Table numbers, modifications, dietary restrictions, drink preferences—he kept it all in his head until he could input everything into our POS. That level of mental organization was remarkable, and it showed us the incredible lengths hospitality professionals go to deliver exceptional service.
This wasn’t just impressive memory—it was passionate dedication to guest experience. He had chosen this approach because it allows him to give full attention to guests during the ordering process, maintaining eye contact and personal connection rather than looking down at a screen. Our system’s multiple taps for simple orders (getting water takes 3+ clicks versus competitors’ 1-2) meant he preferred to batch-enter everything later at the POS station when he could focus on the technology without compromising guest interaction.
The challenge became clear: how can we make our system support rather than compete with this level of service excellence?
The waitstaff had their own approaches. When we mentioned our internal terminology for their roles, one server corrected us immediately: “We’re not ‘meseros’ just serving tables. We’re ‘camareros’—we create the entire experience around each table.”
That language correction hit us hard. They were actually hospitality artists who happened to use our POS as one tool in their craft.
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They Turned Hotel Rooms Into Restaurant Tables
Alejandro Alberola showed us something that stopped our design team cold. He had figured out how to turn our restaurant software into a room service system just by thinking differently about what a “table” could be.
When room service orders come in, he switches to the “Room Service” outlet in the POS and clicks the room number from what looks like a table layout. Room 237 wants breakfast? He clicks “Table 237” and takes the order.
We never thought about our table management system for hotel rooms. But here it was, working perfectly for something we never thought of. This professional had turned our restaurant software into a room service system just by reimagining what our “table” feature could represent.
“Wait,” one of our designers said during our workshop later, “they’ve basically created their own interface logic.”
They’d customized our POS like people customize their phones—making it work for their reality. Both Palacio de Atocha and Palacio de Villapanés had built dozens of similar creative solutions around our system. Not because it’s broken, but because every property needs different things that we hadn’t thought of.
But here’s what bothered us: they were doing too much work. We were forcing them to adapt to our system instead of building something that could adapt to them.
Back in our Madrid workspace, what started as a planned 2-hour analysis turned into something else. Our whole design team was together in person for the first time in a year, and everyone was talking at once, sketching on whiteboards, excited to build on each other’s ideas nonstop.
We came up with five things we could potentially improve:
- Faster profile switching – Currently, staff have to dig through multiple menus just to log in as a different user during shift changes or when multiple people share the same station
- One-click product selection – Instead of requiring multiple screen taps for simple items like water, we want to streamline the most common orders
- Smarter table transfers – When guests move from the bar to a dining table, or from the pool area to the restaurant, staff should be able to move their orders along with them more easily
- Built-in support help – When tablets freeze during busy periods (which happens more than we’d like), staff need quick assistance without lengthy phone calls
- Better payment splitting – European guests often want to split bills in ways that our current system doesn’t handle smoothly
What We Want to Learn More About
Palacio de Atocha confirmed that our POS fits boutique properties well, but it also highlighted our biggest opportunity: we want to understand how these patterns apply to larger, even more complex operations. CoolRooms runs smoothly with 10 POS users across 5 service areas. What happens with 50 users? Multiple outlets? Complex room service operations?
We learned a tremendous amount about food and beverage operations, their creative workarounds, and how they manage to make the system work for them instead of the other way around. Now we want to know if these insights apply to larger properties too, or if scale creates entirely different challenges.
If you’re working at a larger property and you’re open to sharing your experiences with our team, we’d love to connect through the Mews Community where hospitality professionals share insights and best practices.
What This Means for Your Operations
The biggest lesson for restaurant operators: your staff are probably more innovative than your software. They’ve likely developed dozens of workarounds to make their systems serve guests better, but they shouldn’t have to work so hard to make technology useful.
Look for the creative solutions your team has already developed. Those workarounds reveal exactly where your current tools are falling short and point toward what could be improved. The restaurant staff we observed didn’t just use our POS system—they transformed it into something that actually helped them deliver exceptional hospitality.
The Palacio de Atocha visit taught us that the best product insights come when we stop assuming we know how our products are used and start learning from the people who use them every day.
Sometimes the most valuable feedback comes not from surveys or feature requests, but from watching professionals adapt tools in ways nobody originally intended.
Special thanks to Alberto Martínez, COO CoolRooms Hotels, and the entire team at CoolRooms Palacio de Atocha, and CoolRooms Palacio de Villapanés, for their openness and expertise during our July 2025 research visit.
Would you like to learn more about our work with clients? Check out this blog post about our hackathon with Hey Lou!
