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How Kew Green Hotels is delivering the future of F&B with Tevalis and Planet
Large enterprises
How Kew Green Hotels is delivering the future of F&B with Tevalis and Planet
At a glance
- Replaced a pay-per-transaction platform that split a single meal into four or five separate payments with an integrated Tevalis point of sale and Planet payments solution, across more than 40 hotels.
- Delivered in four to six weeks against a hard October deadline, on a project that was unbudgeted when it began.
- F&B operating efficiencies of 5% already achieved through a workforce now augmented by modern payments solution.
The challenge
Kew Green Hotels manages and owns hotels across the UK under IHG brands. When Toby Hill arrived as F&B Director and settled into the role in early 2025, he reached one conclusion almost immediately: the payments solution powering their food and beverage operation had to change.
The platform the group was running charged per transaction. A guest who ordered a drink, then a meal, then another drink and finally dessert would generate four separate transactions. The payments provider took each payment separately, deducted its transactional and e-commerce fees, and deposited the remainder into Kew Green's bank.
"There was nothing fundamentally wrong with it if you're a cafe or a street food vendor," says Hill. "But for a hotel environment, it was completely unsuitable."
Receipts were the clearest symptom. The provider had not developed the capability to print them, so corporate guests relied on emailed receipts – and the platform regularly failed to deliver them.
"A corporate guest doesn't want to process five expense claims for a single meal," says Hill. "They want to be able to open a table and have it all in."
He had stopped using it himself. "I stay in four hotels a week, and I thought: can I have a drink, and a starter and a main course? And then I refused to do another transaction after that. It was a very off-putting process for the guest."
The cost landed on the teams as much as the guests. Having to pay upfront, guests wouldn’t prepay service on a meal they had yet to receive, so kitchen and service staff were taking home pennies a month in service charge. Reporting was no better – the intelligence the business needed to drive operational excellence was missing.
While the need to find a new solution was clear and urgent, Hill faced a major challenge – the project hadn’t been budgeted for.
The solution
"The journey, or the search, was to find the right partners who could future-proof Kew Green’s F&B payments solution with us," says Hill. He had around six credible options on his sheet, some providers weren’t responsive to his vision. "With some of the bigger players, you're buying a package off the shelf. There was no continual drive for development."
The introduction came out of the blue. His contact at Barclaycard Payments called him, and she already understood what he was looking for – not just a product off the shelf, but a partnership that could grow with Kew Green.
"Barclaycard knew I wanted people that could understand the business and put the right product in for Kew Green."
That led to Tevalis and Planet. Both teams spent a lot of time trying to understand where the business actually was. "We worked so closely to develop a solution that matched my vision," says Hill. "And that was invaluable."
From Planet, the conversation covered mobile payments, voucher payments and loyalty. "The whole partnership is set-up to give me everything that I wanted to do over the next five years," says Hill. Push payments from Planet into Tevalis took a task away at the table immediately: the order pushes straight through, rather than being rung up on the till and then keyed into a separate card machine.
Then came the rollout — around 40 hotels, off an archaic incumbent that had been "set up to primarily service the provider, not the guest or the wait staff", against an tight deadline.
"We can't forget how quickly this was rolled out," says Hill. "I know that other companies have taken a year to roll something out like this." Kew Green did it in four to six weeks with Planet and Tevalis.
It worked because the approach of everyone involved was dynamic. Both teams knew their platforms, and daily calls with small groups of hotels, with Tevalis, Planet and Hill on the line ensured success. Four trial sites went live first, and were supported by a team that were physically on site, talking the teams through the configuration.
"Tevalis had feet on the ground and that made a hell of a difference," says Hill. "You can't do something like this without people actually in there."
Reporting was rebuilt in parallel. Tevalis ships around 300 pre-built reports; Kew Green's data and analytics team worked with Tevalis to API the data into Power BI and cherry-pick the pieces the business needed.
"Now we have a dashboard where I know what I've sold, when I've sold, at what time I've sold it, when I need to put labour on, when I don't need to put labour on," says Hill. "It was all clear."
The result
The guest experienced changed for the better immediately. Kew Green has a high proportion of return guests, and some of them emailed Hill personally after experiencing the change. "They’re the people that make us money, our guests. Their journey became instantly more pleasurable."
For the wait staff, the friction that had been a part of their daily experience stopped. Once teams grasped the power of what the linked Planet and Tevalis solution could do, "it calmed all the noise". The first site to go live rang him about it: "They said, so we don't have to key it payments, we don't have to ring it up on the till and then key it into the card machine? No, I explained, it pushes it straight through."
An open table changed the economics of a service. Servers can ask whether a guest wants another drink or a dessert, and Kew Green saw an instant growth in upselling. The knock-on effect landed in staff pockets, with service charge per person rising from pennies a month to around £100.
"They could sell more, therefore the service charge equated to more," says Hill. "And the staff then saw that they were actually going to get some benefits out of this, and their performance increased."
At Birmingham M6 Junction 7 — a large hub area running Planet and Tevalis — the site has realized an staffing efficiency of 5%. "The payback right now is that we can now exceed guest expectations with the new solution, while reducing our operational costs.”
Data insights now available have changed the conversation inside Kew Green entirely. "We wouldn't have had a clue," he says of the old set-up. He now knows exactly what discounting costs, whether it draws incremental sales or simply switches them to promotions, and what guests are actually valuing on the menu.
The support Planet and Tevalis offered turned out to be the differentiator he had been looking for. "I had people in my hotel," says Hill. "The teams have got faith in a platform that they're going to get an answer, and they know they've got a person that they know is on it." The response times have built trust on their own. "If they've sent out an email at breakfast, it's resolved before the first customer comes in, which is so important."
The relationship has widened since. Kew Green has rolled Planet out across all front office, and Tevalis mobile POS (mPOS) solution on Planet devices is the next frontier.
The Kew Green Rugby site has successfully piloted mPOS and going in ahead of Christmas. It takes the Tevalis order flow onto a Planet handheld, so a function room with three or four hundred people on a bar gains order and pay points instead of one static till. Day to day, servers open tables and then work three in a row: "Tap, tap, tap, and then that goes through to the bar and it gets delivered."
"This Christmas with mPOS is going to revolutionise our functions," says Hill. "I have zero doubt in our mind. I won't be surprised if we see a 15 to 18% uplift in beverage sales this year because of the flexibility that we have."
The smaller developments matter too. A half-day on site with the Tevalis team made the kitchen screens more agile – tickets stack and bundle more easily, a guest can be added to a table, and an order carrying an allergen now shows in a different colour. "Sounds simple," says Hill. "But when you're serving 200 people, it makes a real of a difference."
As for what comes next, Hill is confident that Planet and Tevalis can innovate with Kew Green and adapt, with to deliver next generation hospitality experiences.
What’s more, he is already recommending it. Around six people a month reach out to ask how Kew Green did it. "The most important thing was finding the people that can understand your business, Planet and Tevalis have been the winning combination”.
"We've been lucky enough to find partners that want to develop, this is not a standstill partnership. They're dynamic and innovative with us in meeting our ambitions – a group of people that are very customer and guest focused, a group of experts who are very proud of their platforms, but who aren't forgetting what we're actually doing here. And that is servicing guests."
Toby Hill, F&B Director, Kew Green Hotels
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