AI systems for hotels and hospitality groups
Enquiries arrive through the booking engine, the OTA extranets, a general inbox, Instagram, WhatsApp and the phone. Nobody owns all six, so the duty manager triages between check-ins and the wedding enquiry that came in on Sunday is still unopened on Tuesday. That's the problem worth solving.
Tuesday morning in a hospitality business
Fourteen unanswered OTA messages, three of them asking whether you have a cot. A wedding enquiry from Sunday nobody has opened. Twenty-two reviews awaiting a reply. A supplier has changed the mayonnaise and nobody has updated the allergen sheet.
The enquiry inbox that never closes
Six channels, no single owner, and a response time that's measured in hours when guests expect minutes. Most of the questions are the same twenty questions, and the answers already exist in your PMS.
Group and event enquiries going cold
A wedding, an away-day or a private dining request arrives as free text: rough dates, rough numbers, a budget hint. Converting it means checking availability across rooms and function space and building a proposal. So it waits until someone has a clear hour — and by then the enquiry has gone somewhere that replied in ten minutes.
The single most expensive delay in the sectorReviews answered in batches at 11pm
Google, TripAdvisor, the OTAs, OpenTable. Responding properly is a management task with no time allocated to it, so it happens late, generically, or not at all — and it's visible to every future guest.
Menu changes that ripple everywhere
One substitution and the allergen matrix, the labels, the website, the OTA descriptions and the staff brief all need updating. Miss one and it's a criminal offence, not a service failure.
What we'd build for a hotel or group
One job at a time, built around the systems you already run, with your rules on what it may and may not say to a guest.
Unified enquiry triage
Reads every inbound channel, classifies each message, extracts dates and party size into structured fields, and drafts a reply in your voice. Routine questions get answered in the same minute; anything sensitive routes to a person with a brief already prepared.
Typical setup 2–3 weeks.Group and event qualification
Turns a free-text enquiry into a structured brief — date, headcount, space, catering requirement, budget signal — checks the diary and produces a first-pass proposal your events coordinator edits rather than writes.
Where the revenue is.Review response drafting
Drafts platform-appropriate responses in your tone, and flags anything mentioning illness, injury, discrimination, allergens or theft for mandatory human handling. Nothing publishes automatically unless you decide it should.
Allergen and menu propagation
When a dish or supplier changes, re-derives the allergen matrix from your verified ingredient data, produces the label text and issues the staff brief — with a named human sign-off recorded before anything goes live.
Sign-off is mandatory, by design.Rate and parity monitoring
A daily sweep of your OTA listings and comp set, flagging parity breaches, failed channel-manager pushes and competitor rate moves as a morning digest rather than another dashboard nobody opens.
Pre-arrival and post-stay sequencing
Personalised messages that also collect dietary requirements, arrival times and upsell interest — and write them straight back into the PMS instead of into somebody's inbox.
The rules that shape a hospitality build
Hospitality's regulatory exposure is concentrated in a few places, and one of them is genuinely life-critical. That dictates where automation stops.
- <strong>Allergen information must be accurate and verifiable.</strong> The system maintains and surfaces a matrix that humans have verified. It never generates an allergen answer by inferring from a dish description — that distinction is the whole design.
- <strong>Licensing obligations attach to named people.</strong> Age verification, refusal of service and intoxication judgements sit with your DPS and your team, not with software.
- <strong>Guest data under UK GDPR.</strong> Booking data, dietary requirements and any health-related note are personal data — some of it special category. We map what's processed and where before anything is built.
- <strong>Marketing consent.</strong> Pre-arrival and post-stay messaging has to respect the consent the guest actually gave, per channel. We build the consent state into the workflow rather than bolting it on.
- <strong>Accessibility applies to your booking flow.</strong> Any guest-facing interface we build is designed to be usable with assistive technology, because the duty to make reasonable adjustments covers digital journeys too.
What we won't automate in hospitality
Hospitality is a people business and some conversations must stay human. These are the ones we'd refuse to hand over.
Giving a guest a final allergen answer
A model inferring “probably no nuts” from a menu description is a route to somebody being seriously harmed. AI maintains and surfaces the verified matrix. A trained human confirms it to the guest. We will not build it the other way round.
Auto-publishing responses to serious complaints
Anything mentioning illness, injury, safeguarding, discrimination or an allergic reaction is legal exposure, not reputation management. It goes to a person, always.
Refusal of service and age verification
Licensing obligations sit with named individuals for good reason. A system has no business making a judgement about whether someone has had enough or looks under 25.
Resolving a complaint escalation
Refunds, comps and upgrades are goodwill decisions made by a manager. A guest who's already been let down and is then handled by a bot has been let down twice.
Common questions.
Is it safe to use AI for allergen information in a restaurant?
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Not for the final answer to a guest — and any supplier who tells you otherwise is one you should walk away from. What AI can safely do is maintain the allergen matrix: when a dish or a supplier changes, it re-derives the affected entries from verified ingredient data, drafts the updated labelling, and issues the staff brief with a named person signing it off. The information a guest is given still comes from a trained human working off verified data. The automation removes the administrative gap where mistakes actually happen.
Can AI answer hotel guest enquiries?
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Yes, for the large majority that are routine and factual — availability, parking, check-in times, cots, dog policy, directions. A well-built system reads the enquiry across whichever channel it arrived on, pulls the real answer from your PMS, and replies in your voice within the minute. The design work is in the exceptions: complaints, accessibility requests, group enquiries and anything medical route to a person with the context already assembled.
How does it connect to our PMS and channel manager?
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Through the interfaces they already expose. Most property management systems and channel managers offer an API or a scheduled data exchange, and we build against that rather than asking you to change systems. Your team carries on working in the PMS they know; the AI reads from it and writes back to it.
Does this replace our reception or reservations team?
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No, and we'd be sceptical of anyone promising it does. What it removes is the repetitive share of the inbox — the same twenty questions, answered a hundred times a week — so your team is dealing with guests rather than typing. In practice the visible change is response time on enquiries that used to sit for a day, and group enquiries getting a proposal the same afternoon.
How do multi-property groups roll this out?
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One property first, then the rest. We build and prove the workflow at a single site — usually the one with the worst enquiry backlog — then extend it, with property-level differences in tone, policy and rate rules configured rather than rebuilt. That avoids the common failure of nine properties running nine slightly different systems nobody fully understands.
Start with the inbox.
It's usually the fastest thing to prove and the easiest to measure. Tell us how many channels your enquiries arrive on and we'll tell you what's realistic.