Foreword, from the founders
Hey, I'm Chanel, a co-founder of Sorino. Over the last few years our team has watched the same thing happen in hotel lobbies up and down the country. The phone rings out while the desk is checking someone in. A booking walks off to one of the big booking sites. A message sits unread until Tuesday. Nobody did anything wrong. There just were not enough hands.
So we put AI on the channels that were going unanswered, reading from one knowledge base of the hotel's own rooms, rates and policies. Not to replace anyone, but to cover the hours your people cannot pick up. This report is what we are seeing across UK hotels, told plainly, with real numbers where we have them and honest gaps where we do not yet.
What this report covers
A hotel is not one front desk, it is six front doors, and a guest walks up to whichever one suits them. They ring at 2am. They message on the way to the airport. They email a group enquiry on a Sunday. Too often no one is free to answer, and the booking goes elsewhere. This report looks at that problem, and at what AI, used with discipline, is doing about it for hotel groups.
This is the hotels edition. There is a wider report covering hotels, restaurants and bars together.
Read the full hospitality reportSection one
The squeeze every operator already feels
Two things happened at once. Staffing got harder, and guests stopped waiting. Hotels are caught in the middle. On the supply side, the people problem is real and measured.
Source: UKHospitality, 2023.
Read those two together and you get the shape of the problem. There is often no spare person to staff the phones, and when the shortage bites, teams stop being able to cover the very hours guests want to reach them. On the demand side, patience has collapsed.
Source: HubSpot, 2025.
An instant reply is no longer a nice touch, it is the baseline, on whatever channel the guest happens to use. The gap between "we are short-staffed" and "answer me now" is exactly where bookings and reputation leak away.
The cost of the gap. A missed call is a room sold by one of the big booking sites at a commission instead of booked direct with you. An unanswered enquiry at midnight is a stay that ends up somewhere else. None of it shows up as a line on the accounts, which is exactly why it goes unfixed for years.
Section two
Hotels: six channels, no single view
The mid-market hotel group is where the fragmentation hurts most. A group of eight to fifteen properties typically runs a booking system, a guest database, a website booking tool and its accounts, and none of them talk to each other. Guest conversations scatter across the phone, web chat, WhatsApp, the big booking sites, email and social, with no one view.
What operators tell us
- "Guest conversations are scattered across six channels and nothing has a single view."
- "We are leaking direct bookings to the big booking sites, and the commission with them."
- "After-hours enquiries just go to voicemail."
- "We have no consistent view across the properties, every site reports differently."
Where AI lands. Not as another dashboard to check, but as the layer that answers across every channel in one consistent voice, books from live availability, and gives you one view of what happened, per property and across the group. The person who runs operations for the group cares about outcomes, not about "a chatbot": rooms filled, hours saved, and direct bookings kept off the big booking sites.
The three that move the numbers
- After-hours cover. The 2am enquiry that used to go to voicemail gets picked up, answered and booked, in the guest's own language, with the details ready for the desk by morning.
- Direct bookings kept direct. Answer the enquiry the moment it lands and take the booking there and then, before the guest drifts off to the big booking sites and the commission that comes with them.
- One view of the group. Every call, message and booking in one place, per property and across the whole group, so nothing slips between sites that each report differently.
Section three
What the AI actually does: four channels, one knowledge base
The shape is simple. One shared knowledge base, the hotel's rooms, rates, policies and local knowledge, feeds four channels so every one answers the same way.
| Channel | What it does | The hour it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | Answers calls in the hotel's tone, checks live availability, takes and confirms the booking, and escalates to a person when it should. | Mid check-in, after hours, the second the desk's hands are full. |
| Reads the inbox by intent not order, replies fast to enquiries and group requests, sends quotes, confirmations and amendments. | The Monday-morning backlog, the group enquiry that cannot wait. | |
| Chat | A branded website and WhatsApp concierge that answers room and policy questions and holds or locks in the booking in-flow. | The moment a guest is still deciding. |
| Social | Answers Instagram and Facebook messages, mentions and reviews before the lead goes cold. | The message that used to sit unread for two days. |
| Knowledge Base | The shared brain all four draw on, so every channel sounds like this hotel. | Always, underneath everything. |
The point that matters to a sceptical operator: it is not four bots. It is one source of truth, four front doors, and a clean hand-off to your team the moment a conversation needs a person.
Section four
What good looks like, and what we will not let AI do
The fastest way to lose an operator's trust is to over-promise. So the guardrails are part of the product, not an afterthought.
- It answers from the record, or hands off. No guessing on rates, availability or anything a guest will hold you to.
- It sounds like the hotel, because it reads from the hotel's own words. Not a generic call-centre script.
- A person takes over the second it gets complicated. The agent knows the edge of what it can handle.
- Everything is on the record. Full logs of every call, message and booking, with clear permissions and clear escalation rules.
- It works alongside the team, it does not replace the front desk. Coverage, not redundancy.
Section five
Getting started: try it before you trust it
You should never have to take a vendor's word for any of this. So the route in is simple: you build your hotel's agent live on the site, ask it the awkward questions yourself, and hear how it answers, before anyone talks about a bigger commitment. If it passes, the next step is a fixed-scope trial with clear measures agreed up front:
- How fast guests get a first answer across the channels you choose.
- After-hours cover, the calls and messages that used to go unanswered.
- Direct bookings captured, the rooms that used to leak to the big booking sites.
Low risk is the whole point. You see it working on your own hotel, in your own voice, before you commit to anything bigger.
Sources
We do not publish a figure unless it is real and attributable. The numbers in this report are:
- UKHospitality, 2023: 61% of businesses reporting staff shortages, 42% cutting opening hours as a result.
- HubSpot, 2025: 82% of consumers say an immediate answer is very important.
The "what operators tell us" lines are drawn from how the buying committee in a hotel group describes the pain. They are representative phrasing, not verbatim-attributed quotes, and no hotel names, deployment counts or results are claimed.