At a guesthouse, the person who answers the phone is often also the one who checks guests in and serves breakfast. In the evening the phone rings unanswered, and messages written in English or German wait until the next day. An AI assistant for hotels and guesthouses covers exactly these gaps: it answers calls and messages out of hours, in the guest’s language.
It tells the guest, right from the greeting, that it is an automated assistant. It can check whether rooms are free, send the booking link and answer the questions that come up every day. It does not negotiate rates and it does not confirm the booking itself: that is completed in the booking system.
The call at ten in the evening and the message in German
Accommodation enquiries pay no attention to reception’s hours. People plan their holidays in the evening, and that is when they write or call. If they get no answer, they book somewhere else or through a platform, where you pay commission on a guest who had already found you on their own.
The second situation is the foreign guest who gets a late reply, or a clumsily translated one. The third is the most ordinary: the same few questions, which you answer from memory every time.
AI assistant for hotels: what it checks, what it sends and what it notes
The guest says or writes the dates, the number of people and the kind of room they are looking for. The assistant asks the booking system what is free and replies with the room types available and the rate shown there.
When the request is out of the ordinary (a large group, an event, a request for a discount), the assistant does not improvise. It takes it down in full and tells the guest that a person will be in touch.
- Availability: rooms free for the dates requested, read from the booking system at the moment of asking.
- Booking link: sent by text message, by email or in the conversation, so that the booking is made directly with you.
- Frequently asked questions: parking, breakfast, pets, check-in time, extra bed.
- Several languages: it replies in the language in which it is written or spoken to, from the same information.
- Transfer: during working hours, the call can be handed to reception on request.
Why confirmation stays in the booking system
A booking means more than “yes, we have a room free”. It means a rate, a cancellation policy, often a deposit and a room taken off sale on every channel. If the assistant promised a room by word of mouth, you would have two sets of records and, sooner or later, a room sold twice.
That is why the assistant takes the guest to the threshold of the booking and stops there. Confirmation comes from the system, in writing, with the terms displayed. Card details are not dictated over the phone either.
The assistant can get a date wrong, so it reads the dates back before it searches. In foreign languages it copes with the usual questions, but a complicated conversation is better handed to a person.
Phone, WhatsApp, chat: the same answers on every channel
We build a single body of knowledge (rooms, facilities, house rules, how to get there) and use it on every channel. On the phone, speech becomes text through speech recognition, and the answer is spoken through speech synthesis. In writing, the same assistant replies in the chat on your website or on WhatsApp, through the platform WhatsApp makes available to businesses, within its rules for automated assistants.
Availability is read through an API, a technical route by which the assistant asks another program which rooms are free: the booking engine on your website or a channel manager (the software that keeps the same availability across all platforms). Not all of them offer such an interface. If it is missing, the assistant sends the link and takes down requests, without stating that anything is free.
The name, phone number and dates of the stay are personal data. The guest is told how they are used, and a call is recorded only if the guest is told so from the start, in line with GDPR.
The house rules, written down once before the season
The quality of the answers depends on what you give the assistant to work from. At many guesthouses the rules are not written down anywhere: the owner knows them. The first stage is to put them on paper, exceptions and all.
The best time is the off-season, when you have time to listen to the tests and correct the answers.
- The inventory of questions: what guests ask you by phone and in messages, starting with the most frequent.
- The approved answers: short, up to date, with the exceptions stated clearly.
- The languages: we choose them according to your guests and check the answers with a speaker of the language, not just with machine translation.
- Tests: searches for fully booked periods and for public holidays, then calls from your team.
- Updating: when you change your seasonal rates or the rules, you change the answers too.
Frequently asked questions
Can the assistant confirm a booking on its own?
No, and it is better that way. Confirmation comes from the booking system, which keeps track of rooms across all channels; the assistant checks whether there is availability and sends the link.
Which languages can it reply in?
Romanian and the main international languages. The quality of the voice and of the recognition varies from one language to another, so we test each one before going live.
Is an assistant worth it for a guesthouse with only a few rooms?
It depends on how many enquiries you lose in the evenings and in season. At low volumes, a well-written automatic reply and a booking engine on your website may be enough.
This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.