Enquiries arrive on ten channels at the worst hours
Phone, WhatsApp, Instagram, OTA messaging and the desk, peaking exactly when the front office is checking guests in. The property that replies first takes the booking.
Industries / Hospitality
Hospitality, run by systems that finish the work.
Enquiries answered at midnight, rates that move with demand, and reviews read as data rather than as mood.
Reservation agents, guest sentiment analysis and dynamic pricing.
The picture on the ground
What Hospitality actually looks like from the inside.
Hotels lose bookings in the gap between an enquiry and a reply. Enquiries arrive on the phone, on WhatsApp, on Instagram, through OTA messaging and at the desk, and the busiest hours for enquiries are precisely the hours the front office is busiest with guests. The booking goes to whoever answered first, which is often an OTA listing rather than the property.
Revenue is the second front. Rate decisions are made weekly against a competitor set someone checks by hand, while demand moves daily with events, weather, wedding season and a conference nobody flagged. Pulling rate shopping, pace, pickup and the local event calendar into one daily view does not replace a revenue manager — it gives them the morning back.
Third is the guest voice. Reviews across booking platforms and Google contain specific, repeated, fixable complaints — a lift, a breakfast queue, a checkout process — but they are read individually and reacted to individually. Treated as a corpus they become an operations backlog with a size attached to each item.
Where it hurts
Four pressures we hear in every review meeting.
Named the way your operators name them, not the way a vendor deck names them. If none of these land, we are the wrong partner for this problem.
Rates move slower than demand
Weekly rate decisions against a manually checked competitor set. A local event or a cancellation wave changes the picture in a day, and the rate is still last week's.
Reviews are read, not measured
A score slides for a month before anyone can name the cause. The same three operational complaints repeat across platforms and are handled as individual replies rather than as a backlog.
Banquets and events run on paper
Enquiry to proposal to banquet event order to kitchen and service, with changes communicated verbally. Something is missed, and it is missed in front of two hundred guests.
What we build
The work that pays for itself first.
Ordered the way we would sequence them in a hospitality engagement. Each one links to the capability behind it.
A reservation agent across every channel
Answers availability, rate and policy questions on WhatsApp, the website and phone in the guest's language, holds and confirms bookings into the PMS through the channel manager, and hands anything unusual to the front office.
Daily demand and rate signals for the revenue manager
Rate shopping, pace, pickup, the local event calendar and cancellation patterns compiled into one morning view with proposed rate moves. Proposals, with the revenue manager still deciding.
Guest feedback turned into an operations backlog
Reviews across platforms and in-stay feedback analysed for recurring themes by department, sized by frequency and by score impact, so the housekeeping and F&B standups get a ranked list instead of anecdotes.
Pre-arrival, in-stay and post-stay messaging
Timed, personalised messages driven by the PMS reservation state — upgrade and early check-in offers before arrival, an in-stay check that catches a problem while it is still fixable, a review request after checkout.
Banquet enquiry to event order, in one system
Event enquiries, proposals, function sheets, kitchen counts and billing in a single workflow with version control, so the change agreed on Thursday reaches the chef and the service captain.
A direct booking channel worth defending
A fast, honest booking site and search presence built to take a share of what currently goes through OTA commission — measured on direct booking share and on contribution after acquisition cost.
The systems it plugs into.
Read-only to begin with, write access only where a workflow needs it, and every integration documented before it goes near production.
Property management system reservations and foliosChannel manager and OTA extranetsPoint of sale for food and beverageRate shopping and revenue management feeds
Review platforms and guest satisfaction surveysCRM and loyalty recordsWhatsApp, call and enquiry logsBanquet and event management systems
How it gets judged
Agreed before the build, measured after it.
These are targets and mechanisms, not results borrowed from somebody else’s project. We baseline each one on your data in the first fortnight, and report against that baseline monthly.
Enquiry response time and conversion
Median time to a real answer across every channel, and the share of enquiries that become bookings. Nights and weekends reported separately.
Direct booking share
Direct as a proportion of total room nights, and contribution after acquisition cost — the number that decides whether the channel mix work paid.
RevPAR against the competitive set
Index against the comp set rather than absolute movement, so seasonality and a good month in the market do not get credited to the system.
Repeat complaint themes closed
Recurring operational themes identified from reviews, and how many are closed with a process change rather than an apology.
What we design around
The constraints come first, not at the security review.
Guest data under the DPDP Act, 2023
Guest identity, stay history and preferences are personal data with a hospitality-specific retention expectation. Purpose, retention and access are defined at design time, and marketing use requires its own consent record.
Form C reporting for foreign nationals
Accommodation providers report foreign guest arrivals to the immigration authority. Where an automated flow touches that process it has to produce a complete, timely and auditable submission, not a partially filled one.
Card data stays out of the conversation
No messaging or voice channel we build accepts card numbers. Payment goes to a PCI-DSS compliant payment page or gateway link, keeping the property's cardholder data environment unchanged.
OTA contractual constraints
Rate parity clauses, content rules and messaging restrictions vary by platform. Automated rate and content changes are scoped to what your agreements allow, and the constraints are written into the system rather than left to memory.
This is how we scope and build, not legal advice. Your compliance, risk and legal teams stay the authority on what applies to your organisation, and we work to their reading of it.
Your first project
Start narrow. Prove the number. Then scale it.
One property, one enquiry desk. Put the reservation agent across WhatsApp and the website, connected to the PMS through your channel manager, and let it handle availability, rates and policy questions with a clean handover to the front office. Six weeks, measured on response time and enquiry conversion, night and weekend performance reported on its own — because that is where the current process is weakest and where the change will show first.
Discovery Sprint
1–2 weeksWe sit with your operators, map the workflows, and score every candidate use case on value, data readiness and risk. You leave with a ranked backlog and a cost model.
- Use-case scorecard
- Data readiness report
- Costed roadmap
Proof of Value
3–4 weeksWe build the single highest-value agent against your real data and measure it against the humans doing that job today. If the number is not there, we say so.
- Working prototype
- Evaluation set
- Benchmark vs. baseline
Bring us one workflow from your floor.
Describe how hospitality works in your organisation — the systems, the constraints, the part that goes wrong every week. We will tell you whether it is worth automating and what the first project would cost.