AI for
Hospitality
Multi-site hospitality groups repeat the same booking, guest and back-office work across different local systems and teams. We automate the common process while keeping people in control of rates, refunds and safety-sensitive information.
~100k
JOBS LOST SINCE OCT 2024 BUDGET (UKH)
£1.4bn
EXTRA WAGE COST FROM APR 2026 (UKH)
2/day
VENUES CLOSING H1 2025 (CGA/ALIXPARTNERS)
Most hospitality AI is a chatbot bolted onto a booking widget
It answers ten questions, gets the eleventh wrong, and quotes a rate the PMS won't honour. In February 2024, the BC Civil Resolution Tribunal made Air Canada pay out for exactly that. Your chatbot is your contract.
The useful cases sit inside reservations, pricing, guest communication and site operations. They need current data from the booking and property systems, along with clear rules for the matters staff must handle.
Those jobs are less visible than a website chatbot, but they have a direct effect on revenue and staff time.
WHAT YOU'VE BEEN SOLD
- Chatbot that hallucinates the cancellation policy
- AI review replies thanking the wrong guest
- Allergen answers from a model with no menu source of truth
- Voice agent that loops and never escalates
- No DPIA, guest data piped into someone's prompt
WHAT WORKS
- Voice agent wired into the PMS, knows real availability
- Review drafts a human signs off, sent inside an hour
- Allergen answers from your recipe spec, not a guess
- Demand model the revenue manager trusts
- Logs, consent and a DPIA your ICO answer points at
Hospitality workflows worth automating
Hotels, restaurants and pubs all have limited covers, rooms and people, while demand changes by the hour. These workflows help operators use that capacity better.
Voice booking
Inbound calls answered, modified, cancelled. Wired to OpenTable, SevenRooms, Mews, Cloudbeds or your own PMS, so it only offers what's available. Hands the call to a human the moment it should.
Revenue & demand
Forecasts that pull in weather, events, comp set, local school holidays. Feed into IDeaS, Duetto or Lighthouse if you have them, or stand on their own if you don't. Surfaces rate moves the GM can defend.
No-show reduction
Zonal's GO Technology survey put UK no-shows at around 12% of bookings. We score every reservation, send the right reminder at the right hour, and only ask for a deposit on the ones that need one.
Reviews & guest comms
Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com pulled in, clustered by theme, drafted into replies that name the guest, the room or the dish. Human signs off. No hallucinated apologies, no replying to the wrong booking.
Back of house
Rota forecasting on top of Fourth, Harri or Deputy. Allergen lookup from your recipe spec, not from a model's memory. Waste tracking that points the chef at the bin, not at a dashboard.
Rules that apply to hospitality AI
It's tempting to point ChatGPT at the menu and let it answer guest questions. It's also how you end up with an allergen answer that doesn't match the recipe spec, sent on your behalf, on your domain.
We build to the rules that already apply to your kitchen and your front desk. The AI doesn't get to invent them.
Allergens come from one source.
Since October 2021 the FSA requires a full ingredient list with the 14 regulated allergens emphasised on prepacked-for-direct-sale food. Any AI that answers "is this gluten free?" reads from your recipe management system, never from training data, and escalates if the data is missing.
Guest data is special category fast.
Face check-in, voice recognition and CCTV analytics require a careful purpose and data assessment. Biometric data used to identify someone uniquely is special category data, and high-risk processing may require a DPIA. Your DPO or legal adviser confirms the lawful basis and whether a non-biometric route is required.
Cards stay out of the prompt.
Voice and chat agents handle deposits via tokenised links from Stripe, Adyen or your existing payment provider. No card number ever enters a model prompt. PCI scope stays where it already is.
Air Canada was liable for its chatbot
Moffatt v. Air Canada (2024 BCCRT 149) ruled the airline liable for what its chatbot promised. Every booking, rate quote and cancellation answer is grounded in PMS data, with the verbatim source attached to the message. If the system can't be sure, it says so and gets a human.
How we start
We connect a defined workflow to the booking, property, guest or finance systems you already operate. The first project is chosen against volume, labour cost, guest risk and available data.
We prove one workflow at representative sites and integrate with the existing property, booking or restaurant systems before proposing a group rollout.
BOOK AN OPERATIONS REVIEWOne-site audit
We pick a single property or restaurant. Two days on site, a look at your PMS, POS, booking flow, phone logs and last quarter of reviews. Out the other end: the three loops with the biggest payback for you, named and priced.
Launch the first loop
A voice-booking or review-response workflow can be a useful starting point when the hotel or venue has enough call or review volume. We measure the baseline, run it at one site and review the result before any estate rollout.
Add the guardrails
DPIA, allergen source of truth, escalation paths, the per-property tone of voice, the logs the ICO would ask for. The bit most vendors skip and the bit that lets you sleep before a roll-out.
Roll across the estate
We prove the common workflow at representative sites, document the local exceptions and agree the group rollout with the operational and technology owners.
What larger operators are using
Hotel and restaurant groups have used these systems for several years. These three examples have been published by the companies involved.
White Castle drive-thru.
SoundHound's voice AI is live across 100-plus White Castle drive-thru lanes, completing around 90% of orders without a human, per the expansion announced by both companies in 2023 and rolled out through 2024. Also live at Chipotle, Jersey Mike's and Church's Texas Chicken.
Hilton, Marriott, Accor, IHG kitchens.
Winnow's computer-vision waste tracker runs in 3,500+ commercial kitchens across 94 countries. Globetrender reported in January 2026 that clients have collectively saved about $100m a year and 28,000 tonnes of food.
And how not to do it.
McDonald's ended its IBM drive-thru voice AI trial at 100-plus US restaurants in mid-2024 after accent and accuracy failures, per CNBC. Voice AI works. Hand-rolling it without a hard fallback to a human doesn't.
Sources: SoundHound 2024 press release; Globetrender, January 2026; CNBC, June 2024; Moffatt v. Air Canada 2024 BCCRT 149; UKHospitality; CGA / AlixPartners Hospitality Market Monitor; FSA; ICO biometric guidance 2024.
When this is worth discussing
We work best when there is a real operating problem, enough volume to measure and people from the affected teams who can make decisions.
Usually a good fit
- An established UK business, usually with annual revenue above £10m
- A repeated process with a known cost, delay, error rate or capacity problem
- A senior sponsor and a day-to-day owner who understand the work
- Access to the relevant staff, systems, sample records and security requirements
We may point you elsewhere
- A standard product already covers the process well
- The requirement is a one-off small build with no wider operating case
- There is no owner or access to the people and data needed to test the result
- The plan relies on AI making high-impact decisions with nobody responsible for review
Questions the buying team will ask
Will a voice agent put my reservations team out of work?
The staffing effect depends on call volume and the operating plan. The workflow can handle defined routine requests while amendments, group bookings, complaints and important guest relationships remain with staff. Leadership decides how any released capacity is used.
We already use IDeaS / Duetto / Lighthouse. Do you replace them?
No. They're good at what they do. We feed them better signals, like local events, weather, comp-set anomalies and demand from your own channels, and we turn their outputs into something a GM can defend on a Monday call.
What about Natasha's Law? I'm not letting AI answer allergen questions.
Good instinct. Nor are we. Where AI handles allergen queries at all, it reads from a single source of truth, the dish or recipe record in your kitchen system, and quotes it verbatim. If the data isn't there, it doesn't guess. It escalates to a named person.
Our PMS is older than Wikipedia. Can you still integrate?
We assess the available API, export and reporting options before promising an integration. Some systems provide a clean interface, while others need controlled imports or vendor support. The proposal states the method, access dependency and any limitation.
How do you stop the chatbot promising things we can't deliver?
Every answer that could become a contract, rates, availability, cancellation terms, deposits, comes from your system of record. The model rephrases. It doesn't invent. The Air Canada tribunal made that question expensive to get wrong, so we treat it as a hard rule.
We're a single restaurant, not a group. Is this for us?
Yes, with caveats. A single-site voice booking agent and a no-show loop pay back inside a quarter on most independent restaurants. The bigger forecasting and rota work only makes sense above four or five sites.
How much does it cost?
A one-site audit is fixed-fee. The proposal separates the first workflow, any later estate rollout, third-party charges and optional support, so operations and finance can see which costs repeat at each property.
Talk to us about your venue operation
Tell us the number of sites, booking and property systems, and the process with the highest labour or missed-revenue cost. We will assess whether one controlled workflow can work across the group.