Ex-lawyer turned founder on reimagining hotel direct booking engine ft. Frédéric Robles of Namastay

Frédéric Robles: Why? When you buy online in the retail world, you can basically pay in one click with Apple Pay, Google Pay. And why is this not available widely in hospitality? And there are many reasons for that, but one of them is the flow of payments in hospitality is very complicated. It's not something that you pay and then you consume.

Host: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another MedTalks hospitality. And today in MedTalks, um, we have a guest called Frederic Roble. Um, he's the CEO and, um, co founder of Namaste, Um, and he's not your typical hospitality founder. He spent over a decade as a tech and antitrust lawyer. He worked at Sullivan and Cromwell and at Amazon before he walked away from all of that in 2021 to start Namaste. And the idea is to make direct hotel bookings and payments as easy as possible. Namaste is now live in close to 400 hotels across 42 countries, working with names like Relay and Chateau, uh, preferred hotels and resorts, and plugged into platforms like Muse as well. And that's exactly the reason why I actually invited him to talk to us, because they've done an integration that others have not yet gone as far with, um, on the booking engine side. And I think it's actually really interesting what you've done in terms of the payment integration. But I actually want to go back to the beginnings, like, because I looked at your history of what you studied, what you worked at. You have no hospitality experience. So how did you end up in this industry?

Frédéric Robles: Uh, we actually, there is a. There is a part that's not on LinkedIn or on my CV, which is linked to hospitality. And it starts with my family. So my. Actually my grandparents had a hotel in the south of France, um, in Lev, a small city near Montpellier. So I used to spend a lot of summers there. So I kind of. That's where I had my first experience with, you know, how to sort of operate a hotel. They had a restaurant. It was like open, you know, 24 7, obviously. And that's. Yeah, it's something that I always had in my mind and it was very close to my family. And also when I was a student in law school, I was working in restaurants and hotels to make a bit of a living on the side. So that, that's something that I always had in the back of my mind as an industry that I liked and that I would like to do something with at some point.

Host: But were you working in the hotel, like in the reception desk or in

Frédéric Robles: the F and B? No, I was, I was more on the like more fmb. So really, you know, uh, taking orders and yeah, this nice being. Being always a waiter on, in. In bars, restaurants and also beach, uh, club on the. On. On the beach really when I love it where, where she's quite popular in, in the south of France where I'm originally from.

Host: So then you became a lawyer and were you just really bad at being a lawyer and you like, I need to escape.

Frédéric Robles: Uh, I was in really good law firms and I was very exposed to tech. So that's that I was very lucky to. I worked for companies like Uber when they started in Paris, uh, which was a very heated case, uh, against taxis and so on. And I, I saw the disruption through technology of sort of an old established market. It's always a story that I, that I liked and I was doing competition law, so I was very. The angle was always to do with competition and antitrust rules. So you know, story of disruptions with technology and I was very exposed to some of these companies and so, um, yeah, I think the story of disruption through new technology is something I always really liked. Um, and so I started first in France, then in the uk, then at Amazon and I was at aws, so the cloud division of Amazon. And I also saw what's happening with sort of cloud technology, which was still quite nascent at the time. And it was fascinating to see a company growing that fast, uh, as well, even though it was already at scale, you know, doing $57 billion, but still growing 20% every year. Um, and that, that was my exposure to tech. Um, and at some point my co founder, uh, Romy came to me. He operates hotels, actually one of the hotels I'm in right now. And he, he was uh, frustrated about the payment and booking experience on his websites. And that's, that's how everything started came up to me. He said, I know you like tech, I know you like hospitality. You probably want to do something with that at some point. So, so the stars align. That was four years ago. And then it was a big pivot for me. Um, stopping a long legal career of more than 10 years to launch something completely new and start from scratch was quite a difficult decision at the time. Uh, but probably the best, the best move, uh, I ever did. So I'm super happy about how things went.

Host: But it was the first months going because I remember when I left my corporate career and those first months were just like, am I cut out for this? I don't even know what's expected of me.

Frédéric Robles: Yeah. Yes. Sleepless nights, uh, am I doing the right move. Am I going to regret this? Uh, but at the same time, I knew I wanted to. There was no way back. I wanted to really give it a try and not regret not doing it in 20 years. So I was like, uh, I went for it. But, yeah, the first month, especially when we were fundraising, we just had a deck. You just had a nice idea. We had nothing. And obviously I have no hospitality experience or tech experience. It was entirely new. So I was very humble at the start, trying to see how this could work. And it turned out so far. Okay, nice.

Host: And the first hotel. So you build a product and obviously you start testing it and you find some bugs. But when you went live in the first hotel, was it immediately perfect or did you have to go through a few iterations?

Frédéric Robles: Quite a few iterations. That's actually, uh, an interesting point because I think we made a mistake that a lot of tech companies do. We did the product a little bit on our own. We, we were shy to show it. We wanted to be perfect before showing it to the customer. And I think we should have iterated a lot earlier. It would have saved us quite a lot of time because you want to get the feedback from the customer as soon as you can. And actually, yes, the launch was delayed. I mean, we actually launched the product pretty much six months after starting the company, which is pretty good. But we had, yeah, we had some back and forth. We went live and then, you know. And the problem is it's such a core part of the tech stack. The direct booking on the website has to work perfectly. If there is a problem, the hotel loses money instantly. They feel like the guest is going to go somewhere else or to an ota, and then it results as a disaster. It needs to be extremely stable. That's why we've put in place a lot of, uh, QA processes to ensure that it's actually perfect. But, uh, no, we needed a lot of iterations, certain features that now we don't have. But, yeah, it took a lot on, um, launch. An MVP is very not easy.

Host: And did you have patient customers in the beginning?

Frédéric Robles: Yes. So in our very first group, they knew they were a pilot. They were actually extremely collaborative. They also knew they could give us a lot of feedback that we would take into account. We had the ability to be super agile at the beginning, so we sort of designed the product a little bit for them at the very beginning. So it was very sort of custom to their needs. But I think we still do that a lot with even new customers with different feature requests and so on. But um, yeah, they were extremely patient with us. Yes. And they're still here, so well done.

Host: Um, so when you started and we said, oh, we're going to build a PMS, everyone's like, there's so many PMSs out there, why not just buy some solution for your hotel? It's so hard to innovate in that space. The booking engine space might be even more crowded than the PMS space. Every channel manager has a booking engine, every PMS has a booking engine. Then there's booking engine companies. So what was it that you felt was missing from that space that you are solving?

Frédéric Robles: Yeah, the original pain point was mostly was very simple. It was digital wallets. Why? When you buy online in the retail world, or if you want to order a car with Uber, if you want to order food with Deliveroo, you can basically pay in one click with Apple Pay, Google Pay. And why is this not available widely in hospitality? And I mean there are many reasons for that, but one of them is the flow of payments in hospitality is very complicated. It's not something that you pay and then you consume. It's usually you make a reservation, you arrive at the check in, you've given your credit card details twice. Usually they ask you the first thing when you check in, can I have your credit card again? And it's a pre authorization and then you have the entire, you know, stay and then at the end usually you're charged, uh, again they're going to ask you maybe a third time. So that sort of friction to the payment flow is one of the reasons why it's difficult. Usually you don't, you're not required to pay at ah, the booking. Uh, but that was really, the missing piece was really digital wallet. So that's the, that was the first thing and then the second thing is the redirection. Very often a booking engine, you've got a beautiful website that sometimes costs a fortune for a hotel and you click on book now and then you're in a different environment with a different URL. And that's what traditionally, um, most booking engines look like. So the idea was to really bring that, making it seamless, remove all the friction that you can, making it uh, you know, as fast as possible. But also as a natural extension of the hotel's website, it's the face of the shop. Usually it's the first experience you're going to have with the hotel is the website. So if that's not good or you uh, know on par with the experience, you're going to have in the hotel. It can be very a disconnect on the branding and I think.

Host: So how much customization can hotel do? Because uh, like especially if you're in the luxury segment and I saw some of your customers in the beautiful hotels but usually in that segment hoteliers want customization to the look and feel of their website.

Frédéric Robles: Yes. And we do adapt to that. So um, some of our customers ask for for example custom font which sounds easy but actually from a design perspective is very difficult. Ah. So we managed to do that same for sort of the colors, the logo, the theme, obviously the pictures, everything comes in. So we really try to make it uh our design team is absolutely. Product and design team are, are absolutely amazing for that. Uh uh. But yeah we really try to make it as a natural extension of the, of the hotel and there is a

Host: lot I understood when you said oh fonts is like not easy but like maybe to a non technical hotelier. Can you explain why fonts make it hard?

Frédéric Robles: So yeah, depending on the, on the font. So also I mean there, there's language can also be an issue if, if you, if it's uh, you know, Arabic language that goes in the other way. So in terms of design and ux it's, it's going to potentially mess around with what you want to achieve. Uh, uh, uh in ux, but just the size of for example the size, the width of the font. Obviously things are not going to appear the same way um if they're not sort of standard. Uh and it's one of the challenges. So the way we do it, when we have a custom font request we still try to see if it actually makes the design wave and if we need to make any adjustments for the buttons, for example so the text is going to be sometimes very long to say certain things. For example when we translate into German certain words are taking longer can have an impact. So we try to adapt on this and I think we have quite some flexibility. But uh, yeah, you need to make it. What we try to achieve always is to have still the best possible experience. We're really experience obsessed uh when it comes to the design.

Host: Like it's just like the width, right? Because sometimes the letters are flatter and wider and then it pushes out of the button or it goes over the top or the bottom of the button.

Frédéric Robles: So you have to really like a

Host: 12 size doesn't mean for every font type 12 is actually the same size.

Frédéric Robles: So we always try to do it with some form of harmony. Uh and uh, it's usually sometimes a discussion with uh, our designer and we always try to find a way that make the hotel obviously happy and for them it's a very important thing. They love customization and something they're really living with their brand.

Host: One of the things we found and I actually don't know if that's still the case but um, custom funds take longer to load than a standard F that's available on the Internet. Have you found problems with that?

Frédéric Robles: No, we haven't had issues on latency or loading with that. Uh, but we do tests very much before just saying yes or agreeing to changing a phone. So it's something we do on our side. We always try to remove all the work for the hotel so we don't have a back office or anything like that. It's really as easy as possible for them. So we do the configuration on our end we can have a discussion on how things look to make sure it's completely optimized for the hotel. Same for the description or the choices. Uh, we found that when you have more than 3, 4 or 5 for example rates you lose the guests. There's too, too too much choice. So uh, you want to be optimal. Is 3 to 4 is, is is a good sweet spot beyond that usually and it's same for the text if you have too much scroll scrolling people usually don't really read so.

Host: And how do you deal with translations?

Frédéric Robles: Uh so we can automate a lot of that. We, we do three thankfully. Uh, we're still a small team. We have 20 people but we do have different nationalities so we run checks always when we do translations on the ones we can speak and then for the rest we try to automate but sometimes we also take it from whatever comes from the pms. So if the PMS already support or the CRS already supports the languages this is what the source come from.

Host: Nice. You actually started with payments but that's the checkout process. So when you get to that last page what is unique about the way that you deal with payments versus what another booking engine then does?

Frédéric Robles: So um, I think the thing that we're still pretty much probably one of the only ones doing is the really the bringing the express checkout to the, to the hotel and that means not having to enter any information and it's you can do it especially on mobile where you going to pay? With Apple pay it's not only going to make give you the ability to pay but also sending all the personal information of the guest. First name, last name, email address, telephone Number sometimes even uh, if there is a just the address of the guest we can also send it. So all of that information in basically one step.

Host: It's like when you buy on TikTok right? When you're on TikTok and you see an ad and you like, you like it and Apple Pay pops up and you just press the button twice and it has all your address details and it's ordered within.

Frédéric Robles: One click and you have exactly and you have your delivery uh address and everything is already there. You don't need to enter anything. And that's really I think where the magic happens. And it sounds easy but it's actually really difficult. And most booking engine even when they offer wallets or alternative method usually require you to enter some form of information to create a guest profile or to enter actually physical information. And that's the last step of friction that we're trying to remove. We also found some interesting data is that when someone triggers a payment with Apple Pay they're far more likely to go through the entire process and actually confirm the payment than if they start entering credit card information. So you really want to increase that conversion and also give a sense of um, safety to the, to the, to the guest and the customer because Apple Pay feels very safe. Right. Versus sometimes when you give your credit card information randomly you can feel a bit more.

Host: Yeah, I'm typing in a 16 digit number on some website.

Frédéric Robles: I don't know. One of the things we enable is obviously online payments and it's something that we do very well so with news payments obviously but we still have hotels today in 2026 asking for credit card number over the phone or by email or even sometimes and keeping those because

Host: I know why it's bad but why is that bad? Nationality is never over.

Frédéric Robles: As a former lawyer, uh and you know I was very surprised about how some hotels are non compliant with European regulations especially when it comes to payments. Uh but I think a lot of it is comes from habits. It's been like this, it's ingrained in this industry that you, you know you can take credit card number on a payment terminal and do a, they call it French distance and it's completely illegal if the person is not here and you're not supposed to have the information in clear in your hands. When it comes to credit card, I

Host: think in English it's called motto which is mail, uh, some kind of transaction because back in the day that's how you do transactions. But our industry is pretty one of the last industries that are still doing Most of transactions where you get unencrypted credit card numbers that you're typing into a terminal one, the fees on those kinds of transactions are significantly higher than a card presence transaction or a 3D secure transaction. Meaning there's a two factor authentication that happens with the biometric, for example to verify. But also the chargeback rate goes up because if you get a chargeback on a transaction like that, it's very unlikely you're going to win it because you've just transacted a random number on a payment terminal. No one knows where the customer was actually there. You could have just bought a stolen kind of archive of credit card numbers.

Frédéric Robles: Exactly. No, it's, it's, it's crazy uh, to still see that and I think cost is a big issue for a lot of hotels. The reason why they're doing this is obviously it's, it's, it's cheaper but it's really shifting also because there are for example some countries where they start now controlling hotels about the credit card information. I mean it's, it's the ultimate sensitive personal information of someone. I mean obviously you have gdpr, your personal information, your phone, your first name, last name, uh, your emails, your contact details and so on. But your credit card information is the highest, should be the thing that's the most secure and, and it's should, yeah, it's the thing that, that is subject to the most protection and, and today to see still 20, 26 hotels having that in, in a notebook randomly or some, you know, the post it with the credit card information in five star luxury properties in Paris, it's crazy.

Host: So you integrated news on the, on the payment SDK as well because most booking engines will just integrate um, like rates and availability and then they can send us these credit card numbers through a vault. But you actually went a step further and you embedded news payments into your booking flow, right?

Frédéric Robles: Correct. Yes. I think we were the first third um, party booking engine doing this integration and also enabling uh, Apple pay to news hotels. So that is a very exciting step and I think we also have some improvements that are on the way and being worked on to enable the full Express checkout that we talked about. So having really the direct one click.

Host: Yeah, and that's why I'm excited about it because what we see with other booking engines or channel managers, they just send us the credit card numbers through in it it works but it's not too, it's not 3D Secure transactions because now we have to transact them as moto.

Frédéric Robles: But what you do is you actually

Host: take the payments 3D, secure it, you'll pass like we'll do that with the Muse flow so that now I can transact that card for check in, for checkout. So at no point of the check in or checkout journey do I ask the guest about that card again. If you think about uh, a check in experience, it's like our five minutes it takes to check in. Half of that is payments, like printing receipts and passing a credit card back and forth. But actually because you've taken the booking so beautifully and so secure, we now can take these three secure follow up transactions at the hotel. And that makes the guest journey significantly easier.

Frédéric Robles: Exactly. You remove the friction entirely when it comes to payment. You do your Apple pay once and you never have to do it again. That's the ultimate experience.

Host: So I imagine conversion is pretty strong. If you started with payment float tells me that you care about conversion. But can you tell me anything about how it's converting?

Frédéric Robles: Yes. Um, so obviously we are a small piece of the entire system. So everything needs to be perfect. The hotel needs to be nice. The pricing uh, strategy needs to be good as well to have ideally a direct pricing uh, that's going to be better than on other platforms, OTAs or so on when the hotel can do that. What we've seen, which is very interesting is mobile conversion. That's really where usually we have the highest impact. Because what's surprising with hotels is most of the time the traffic on their website is mostly on mobile. So everybody's with their phone today. They always go on the website on their phones is how they start the discovery uh, of usually most hotels. But the conversion is always the reverse. It always is higher on desktop than on mobile. That's what's happening in most hotels around the world today. And for us we were able to shift that conversion a lot into mobile. So we have hotels uh, that have more than doubled their mobile bookings, some of them up to 50% of mobile bookings versus desktop, which is huge in terms of, in terms of conversion and a lot of it usually it depends also of the type of hotels and the profile of the clients. Usually when you have a lot of US customers they're going to use Apple pay a lot more than in other countries. Uh, and then we know and, and uh, we just know that the conversion is going to go massively with Apple pay on these devices. So we increase. Usually it's up to 2.5x on mobile. That's what we see uh, in terms of Mobile bookings and then what we see is half of them are with Apple pay. Another interesting thing is people tend to spend more money with Apple pay because they have less time to maybe think or maybe also because people who own Apple device have more money but they actually they do spend more with Apple pay. So it was another interesting finding. So clearly conversion acceptance rates uh, is higher but uh, it's going to depend. I mean obviously yes we play a part in it but it's going to depend a lot also on the, on the hotel, what they have to offer and um, the price of privacy.

Host: And one of the challenges I always have with hotel booking engines is that if I book two or three rooms then I have to do three times the entire process to book those rooms. Do you support multi room kind of booking flows?

Frédéric Robles: Yes. So it was actually in our mvp, believe it or not it was a requirement of that of the first hotel we ever deployed, Grand Pigalle Hotel in north of Paris called South Pigalle. Uh and they required multi room booking. So it uh, was actually a very difficult feature to build because usually um, you cannot have one reservation number for this. So it's actually going to be multiple reservations in one single flow but with 1, 1 payment at the end and it's something we can support. So you can select how many rooms do you want to book, how many people per room are you going to have kids into the room and all that complexity? We can deal with it. And usually you choose your first room and then you choose the second room and then you choose the third room and then at the end you pay. So we do support that. Yes.

Host: Nice. And multi property I saw on your

Frédéric Robles: website that you support as well Actually we launched a new version of the multi property where it's very important for property for especially for strong brands and groups that have a strong identity with different properties. Sometimes in the same city where they want one of the property is going to be full they want to suggest the sister property that is maybe not very far and that has availability for that date. So cross property um, uh, I would say upsell is something we do support and it's very important for. And now we do have it with a map so you can see where the hotels are located as well. And it's on brand stays on on the website of the hotel. It's a very amazing uh experience on

Host: the calendar I can see the rates I think. Right. Which is always like helpful because I don't know which dates I want to come and we haven't still deployed this on the Muse booking engine. And we've had a lot of customers ask for this particular feature saying, you know, I want to show every rate, every date, what rates available or if there's no availability. So I don't even have to go into step two to figure out what the rates and then go back to step one to try different dates.

Frédéric Robles: So yes, we do support it. Some hotels don't like to show their rates publicly, so we can also turn it off. Certain luxury properties actually don't like showing their rates. Uh, first thing you have to go through the process. But we do, yes, we do show usually it's systematically the lowest rate for that day.

Host: So, um, one of the big challenges that we've talked about for many, many years is like how do you get more direct bookings versus LTAs we see in our data that is between 5 to 15% is what a hotel gets direct. And um, it's very hard to go over that. And some brands go significantly higher. But majority of hotels are not very savvy on their website and driving traffic through the website. Um, do you think it's possible to go over 15% and what would you recommend hotel do?

Frédéric Robles: Yes, it is possible. Uh, I think it's also the direction we're going into. It's a bit like um, I mean at least that's my perception. I think hotels a bit like other industries. For example, when you used to book a flight 20 years ago, you would go to an agency or to a physical store to actually, or you would call the airline to actually book your flight. These days are gone. Now most people are doing it online. They usually, and I also, they also doing it direct on the website of the uh, on the airline. And I think hospitality is going to be the same. I'm still very surprised that it's about 25% or 20% of bookings are actually direct on the mobile on the website. It's still very much the minority of most bookings still on the website, but it's clearly changing. There is a lot of different ways to do this. Um, obviously the website is super important. The distribution angle and the visibility of the direct booking engine is critical as well. So everything product like Metasearch, uh, also any AI optimization to make sure that uh, your website is actually going to show up on any sort of search, sort of the general marketing visibility is extremely important. But then also you need to have a great, and it's an investment that most hotels sometimes are not always ready to, to, to make. Uh, but having a great booking experience that also includes the payments. Some of the blocker that we see is also people don't feel very safe on some the hotel's website because you're, you know, you're on a different, you go to the booking engine, you're kicked out of the website, you feel like you have to give your credit card information. It doesn't feel very safe. So improving this, we have some hotels that are, have now a majority of direct bookings on their websites. Uh and some of them obviously very famous brands are not even on OTAs because they don't need to. I love that.

Host: So when I go into one of your customers websites and I click on book now which uh, is usually the thing that opens the booking engine. Does it open a new URL? Does it stay within the website of the hotel?

Frédéric Robles: It stays in the website. So it's an iframe, uh, that stays on the website so there is no redirection whatsoever. It's also great for tracking because you keep the guest on the same website and you can really see the behavior of the guest in the same page, not in a different one. You also, it's also better for cookies because you just need to accept them once and not, you know, several times as you go through a different page. So it really makes it more elegant, very fluid, very fast. And it's uh, and yeah, it's basically on the same environment.

Host: Yeah like, and it helps SEO.

Frédéric Robles: Right.

Host: So search engine optimization. If right now you go into a hotel website and I see this all the time when you press book now, it opens a different website on a different website. So what you're basically telling Google customers are not interested in this website, they are leaving very fast into someone else's website. So embedding it inside your website is a really critical component because that means that customers spend more time um, and it feels like a much more natural experience.

Frédéric Robles: Very true. And uh, I think for us also we've been able to improve the way we track uh, this type of conversion. And I think it's very valuable for the hotel to say to see where customers actually drop. Uh, and sometimes it's not always just at the, at the payment side. Obviously it's critical to have as many payment options as you can. But sometimes we see when there is too much, too many choices or that the descriptions maybe are too long, we see that actually people drop a lot earlier in the funnel and being able to give that sort of feedback to the, to the hotel is also super, super important for, for us.

Host: How is AI impacting your Business, like what, what are you planning to do with it? Like how can we help hotels like become serviceable on LLMs, et cetera?

Frédéric Robles: Yeah. So I think the best angle for us is on the distribution angle that you mentioned. So we're in discussion with a few companies that are uh, creating what I think will be probably the equivalent of MetaSearch for AI where we enable and we increase the visibility of the websites on AI platforms. And I think today most booking engine are fixed on the hotel's website. So you need to be on the website to actually make a direct booking. There is no other way. So you say one of the things we want to build at some point is to enable a booking layer potentially not on the website. But why not directly in an AI chatbot or on Google Maps when you can. Today you can book a restaurant with OpenTable or other uh, 7Rooms or ZenChef platforms like this directly into uh, Google Maps with no redirection whatsoever. But if you want to book a hotel you always have to be redirected to the website. And I think removing that friction and being able to do this natively in one of these platforms would be a great way to just improve this path. And it's something I believe in. Um, but then also when it comes to AI generally, I think we've seen it when it comes to just the way we produce now, the development team has increased extremely significantly with these tools, which is great because we were fast, but now we're even faster which is super exciting.

Host: And you talked about MetaSearch there briefly. And I remember when I started I was like, you, uh, I didn't know anything about technology at the time and I think everyone kept talking about metasearch and hospitality and I just couldn't figure out what it was to like actually Google it and spend some time. But can you explain non technical hotelier?

Frédéric Robles: Uh, so it's um, it's, it's really enabling visibility usually of the direct website on different platforms. So it starts with Google, which is the usually Google free hotel booking links is to make sure you have the official website that is referenced there and that's going to pop up in the top of the search. You have different ways to do this. Some are sort of, they call them free, but it's not really free. But it's going to make the visibility a little better for the website. And then you have the paid ones where it's basically paid advertisements to make sure that the website is going to show when you do a search at the top. And that can be on different, other platforms, uh, like Trivago or tripadvisor and so on. So the goal is really to increase visibility for the hotel and then ideally you want to have that plugged with your booking engine and your website to make sure uh, the experience is seamless when the hotel And I think it's very important also for price comparison as a tool and that's where it gives transparency to the guests. On ideally showing that if you book direct you're going to have a better price. So it's like.

Host: And I think one of the challenges I always find is that Hatale spend a couple hundred euros on Metasearch and then they have a booking.com invoice of €40,000. Um, and I'm like, yeah, but how do you think about budgeting for uh, Metasearch for Booking engine?

Frédéric Robles: Yeah, exactly. And I think the lack of investment, uh, on this front is major for the hotels, but I think it's shifting and hotels now are more sensible and realize that if that was also the idea of namaste at the beginning is to bring the hotel on the same level playing field than what they're up against with OTAs and to have at least uh, an experience that is at least as good as an ota, but if not potentially better if you can. Um, you know, it's frustrating to see why would booking account enable all these different payment methods. And then you go on the website and the only thing you can do is Enter your 16 digit card number and like.

Host: And I think this is where MetaSearch works. It really does work, but it does require an investment. So with booking.com, you pay afterwards, right? So the booking comes and then you pay a commission afterwards. So there's little risks to the uh, hotel. Whereas with Metasearch you're basically saying I'm paying up front to drive traffic and then that needs to convert. And I think this is where the wariness of hoteliers comes from, that they have to decide upfront how much money are they going to put behind it. But it genuinely does work. So if you take, if you have 50% of your bookings coming from booking.com and you know you're going to pay them 18% commission, you know how much you're spending so to drive traffic because like out of the 18%, I would assume booking spends 12 to 15% on traffic generation. So that is the budget that you need to put on your website to drive traffic into the website. And it does really work.

Frédéric Robles: But you have to be, you know,

Host: Quite academic about how much do you spend? Did it work? What, what didn't work? And then it's rates every single month.

Frédéric Robles: Yeah. And also be patient because building that online reputation and reference can, can take some, some time. But yeah we've seen every single uh, property investing in this. At some point we'll get results out of it.

Host: So what's on the agenda for this coming year in terms of like feature development or what are you excited about?

Frédéric Robles: Uh, so several, I mean many, many things in the pipeline. I mean obviously on payments what we've launched recently, we do also buy now pay later option, uh, which is great. Or bringing uh, for example with one of the French companies we work with called Alma, which is the French equivalent of Klarna, um, enabling uh, the giving the ability to pay in several installments and we actually saw a few, a few properties where they increased revenues thanks to that. So people would upsell, you know, take a, a better room if they know they can pay it and split the payments which is quite interesting. Basically sleep now, pay later. I think that's great. And we were, we were the first ones enabling ALMA for, for hotels in France which was, which is very exciting. Uh, the new multi property experience also um, I think a big piece of work for us. But one of the things I'm very excited about that we're working on, we're working on now is enabling restaurant reservations and spa reservations directly into the booking flow. We have properties with for example a Michelin star restaurant, uh, where they want to make sure when people come and book the hotel they usually want to have one night in the restaurant because it's you know, a very famous restaurant where there is a Michelin star and so on and they want to be able to book that ideally at the, the same time when they book the hotel room. And today you can't usually you're going to have to do one booking for the hotel and you're going to have to call the hotel or give a comments to say hey I also want to have dinner Saturday nights at the restaurant. What we're going to do is enable through API the booking uh, of the restaurant within our booking flow. So you can then chefs then in the flow or. Exactly. Yeah. So we're, yes we're in discussion with several different partners but we could uh, we actually uh, actively looking on doing this with Zentef which we have a lot of common customers. So a French French company. So we, we speak the same, the same language on many things and we actually address the very similar Customers, Uh, and then the idea is to have it as an add on. Hey, do you want to book or do you want to book a table during your stay and do that automatically without having any conversion.

Host: If you do that before you capture

Frédéric Robles: the initial booking, there is only one way to know, is to give it, give it a try. Um, the idea is to make it super seamless and not disrupt the flow. Obviously, yes, we want to. The priority is always to convert the hotel first. We can also do it. We will iterate on that, obviously. But the goal for now is to have it in the booking for us as one other step of the process you can skip or you can decide to continue, um, and complete the booking. Uh, but one of the things we could do is also do it after the booking is made as a potential add on, once the booking is confirmed.

Host: Great. So if a Muse customer is interested in switching on, um, the Namaste booking engine, how do they go about that?

Frédéric Robles: Uh, they can contact us, I guess, very, very quickly. They go in the marketplace. Uh, we are on the marketplace with Muse, so I think that usually is the starting point. And actually it's the fastest and easiest way to, uh, implement Namaste versus any other platforms that we've integrated with. Because the hotel can almost do it themselves. When they request access, which is going to give us access to their inventory, all the information that we need. And then usually it's a script, uh, that we run on the website. We can do usually a test, uh, it really takes to the hotel. It should not take more than 40 minutes in total. We do two calls, a kickoff call at the beginning to collect all the information if there is any fonts, colors, theme they want to have. And then we, once the widget is set up, we do a second call, which is a test call, where we run a few test bookings, making sure everything looks perfect. And then you flip a switch on the website and you're good to go. So fairly, fairly easy.

Host: Congrats on the amazing business. I love the partnership. I love that you took the traditional booking engine a lot further and I'm sure that has great conversion results. But, um, thank you so much for joining me and sharing all of your insights. I really appreciate it.

Frédéric Robles: Thanks, Matt. Thank you so much for having me. And, uh, yeah, speak.