A 24/7 AI concierge on the phone

Client profile

Azure Bay Hotels runs a group of seaside properties with a combined front desk team of eleven, of whom only two cover the night shift across all locations. Guests still call for the things a booking engine cannot answer: whether a late checkout is possible, if the room has a sea view, whether the spa is open before breakfast. The phone line is also the last direct sales channel the hotel fully controls, because everything that goes unanswered ends up rebooked through an OTA.

The challenge

Night shift couldn't field every call about late check-out, bookings and local tips, and direct reservations leaked to OTAs.

Guests wanted instant answers, not a callback in the morning.

Night reception was the pinch point. Between arrivals after the last flight, walk-ins and the switchboard, one person could physically hold one conversation at a time. Calls about late checkout, parking, early breakfast and shuttle timing stacked up, and the standard answer became a note on the pad: call them back in the morning.

By morning the guest had already made a decision. Someone asking at 11pm whether a superior room was free for two extra nights did not wait until nine; they opened Booking.com and reserved there, with the hotel paying commission on a room it could have sold directly. The requests that did get answered arrived at the desk as scattered notes with no consistent record of who asked for what.

The daytime shift inherited the backlog. Reception spent the first hours of the day returning missed calls instead of handling check-in and in-house guests, which pushed the queue in the lobby and made the front desk feel permanently behind.

Why earlier attempts failed

• Overnight answering service The operators could only take a message and had no access to availability or rates, so every call still needed a hotel callback the next day.
• IVR menu with extensions Guests calling about a late checkout do not fit a menu tree, and most pressed zero or hung up before reaching anyone.
• FAQ page and chat widget It answered browsers on the website but did nothing for the phone line, which is where guests already staying at the hotel actually call from.
• Extra night shift hours Adding coverage raised payroll without fixing the peak: calls cluster in bursts around late arrivals, not evenly across the night.

The solution

A MyChatBot voice agent now answers the concierge line around the clock, handling guest questions, availability checks and direct booking requests, and passing anything sensitive straight to reception.

1. Take every call live MyChatBot Calls SDK picks up the concierge line on the first ring, in parallel across as many simultaneous callers as arrive, so nothing rolls to voicemail during a late arrival burst.
2. Load the property knowledge Knowledge Base Business Domain docs hold room categories, checkout and late-checkout policy, parking, breakfast and spa hours, shuttle timing and pet rules per property, with Agentic Search pulling the right property answer instead of a generic one.
3. Quote and book directly The agent checks availability and confirms direct reservations, writing them through create_crm_deal with add_crm_client_contact so the booking lands in the hotel PMS pipeline rather than an OTA.
4. Attach the call to the record Every conversation is logged with create_crm_lead tagged source AI- and lead_chat_link, so reception opens the card and hears the recording plus transcript instead of deciphering a handwritten note.
5. Escalate the delicate calls Hand-off Control routes complaints, group enquiries and anything involving an existing reservation change to a human, with Flight Control pinging the duty manager in Telegram.
6. Follow up on unclosed rooms Follow-ups re-contact callers who asked about availability but did not confirm, and Lead Processing labels separate in-house guest requests from new booking enquiries.

The AI concierge handles calls around the clock and direct bookings rose 18%.

What was deployed

Rollout timeline

Results

What comes next

Azure Bay is extending the same agent to outbound pre-arrival calls that confirm arrival time and offer early check-in or airport transfer, and adding a second language line for inbound international guests.