AI Phone Calls for Hotels & Travel: PMS, OTAs and Multilingual Guests

The guest finds your hotel through Booking.com. He likes what he sees. But just before making a reservation, he picks up the phone because your description doesn’t tell him if the accessible room is close to the elevator, if the shuttle works at 5 AM, or if anyone there speaks Arabic.

And the call turns into either a reservation or into nothing. And all hotels know very little about how often this latter option occurs.

This blog talks about it, and about what AI for hospitality business can actually help with. It’s not about “your virtual receptionist answers all your calls 24/7” type of stuff. It’s about something more concrete:

• Why people who found hotels on OTAs continue calling hotels anyway — and what they mean by doing so
• Which questions from guests can your PMS answer and which cannot — because it does matter
• How language barriers quietly ruin bookings — and particularly in off-hours, when multilingual guests call and there is nobody to help
• What occurs throughout the whole guest cycle — from before bookings to check-in/out and beyond, not just at the pre-booking stage
• How AI voice software transforms OTA guests into direct customers — and that is the distribution aspect that nobody touches

This is for you, if you run a hotel, work in revenue management or evaluate hotel booking software/hotel reservation systems for your property.

Why Travelers Still Call Hotels After Finding Them on OTAs

Something else that should be talked more about in hotel technology forums is the fact that many phone calls that reach the hotel are placed by people who have already looked at the hotel through an OTA website. They have seen the pictures, they have checked the prices and they have maybe even booked a room.

Why would they still call them? Because OTAs only list rooms, they do not converse. The traveler who is going out with his elderly parents needs to know whether the accessible room he can book will be close to the elevator or not. The newly wed couple needs to discuss the flower arrangements for their bedroom.

None of this is captured in an OTA’s traditional directory. It happens during a conversation.

And this is the real reason why AI-based telephone software is interesting to hotel companies – not because it saves time answering calls, but because it is the software capturing the intention behind the call before the opportunity is lost. A guest who is comparing different room options or inquiring about upgrades is indicating their buying intentions. When such calls go unanswered or the call ends poorly because the hotel staff is preoccupied, the opportunity is lost.

What PMS Data Can (and Cannot) Answer

While most conversations regarding hotel tech integrations revolve around how these systems interact with each other, the more important question is: what guest inquiries can be answered based on the PMS data and which need an entirely different approach?

This is important as it dictates where the true value of AI voice automation lies and where its limitations exist.

This is where, in the first half of the table, the AI phone call software works best for the hospitality industry. When the caller says “What’s the price of a double room this weekend?” or “Can you confirm my booking?”, that query maps directly to structured data in a hotel booking management system.

It’s in the lower half where things start to become more interesting. When guests ask about local tourist spots or particular room arrangements, or even travel-related issues, there’s a need for the hotel to have another layer of knowledge aside from the PMS. Those hotels who have done just that through AI or human escalations gain back conversations.

The Multilingual Gap Is a Revenue Problem, Not Just a Service Problem

Let’s take an example of a couple from Japan who are making their first international trip. They find a hotel in London that meets their needs, they want to know how big the room will be, if the hotel’s kitchen can meet any dietary requirements, and the location of the nearest tube station and they call the hotel at 10 PM, which is midday in Tokyo. The night receptionist answers. They cannot communicate well with each other.

No booking takes place.

This situation happens more frequently than hotels realize, because there is not any tracking of such occurrences, since there is no trace left. No data about an abandoned call or a failed reservation exists. The guests just make a booking elsewhere, most likely in a bigger chain hotel where multilingual staff works.

Some of the leading inbound tourism markets for hotel destinations in Europe and North America include large numbers of Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers. Shifts to cover night calls rarely consider this kind of language diversity. The use of AI voice technology to make bookings in the customer’s native language shifts this paradigm dramatically not as translation technology but as booking conversion technology in the language of choice.

Calls Across the Full Guest Journey Not Just Pre-Booking

The bulk of AI solutions for hotels concentrate on the pre-booking call – the person who wants to make a hotel reservation. However, this is just one element of a far larger picture.

When you chart the calls hotel guests actually make, the pattern of calls is very different:

• Pre-booking: Availability, pricing, services offered, room arrangements, packages
• Pre-arrival: Transfer from airport, early arrivals, special occasion preparations, bed arrangements, directions
• Stay-related: Housekeeping, room service, additional towels, noise problems, dining reservations, repairs
• Post-checkout: Lost item queries, billing queries, membership inquiries, review responses

A hotel receptionist deals with all of these calls at once. Hotel receptionists manage a wide range of guest calls, not just reservations. Using AI assistant for hotel reservations, which actually helps to manage half of the operational calls. 

Peak Demand Is Where Gaps Become Visible

Whereas a hotel that copes effectively with Tuesday morning phone traffic might be brought to its knees by an influx of calls during the trade show, big festival, or local sporting event, the number of calls generated during one busy weekend might surpass the number handled on average by a small hotel in a week.

Voice AI does more than cover overflow calls. It deals with the repetitive calls, such as the tenth caller wanting to know when the shuttle for the event leaves and the fifteenth wanting to know if breakfast is included in the rate for the conference. This means staff are free to deal with the calls that do need human intelligence.

This kind of flexibility is especially useful for boutique hotels and independent hotels because they cannot afford to have staff that can handle peak times without overstaffing during off-peak times.

Turning OTA Guests Into Direct Relationships

Here’s the distribution perspective that no one else talks about in hotel AI content.

A guest who made the reservation through an OTA and then makes a direct call to the hotel has already done something very important; he has engaged with the property rather than with the channel. That call, when handled by an AI call assistant or hotel staff, becomes an opportunity to start developing a direct relationship with the guest. By providing instant, personalized responses and capturing guest preferences, the AI call assistant helps strengthen the connection between the guest and the property from the very first interaction.

The AI voice system doesn’t just answer queries at this point. It gathers guest preferences for future stays, identifies requests that indicate loyalty potential (returning guest, particular room, amenities preferences), and generates sales opportunities that would be impossible to generate in the OTA reservation process room upgrade, dining package, late check-out.

OTA gets the first reservation. The hotel, provided with the proper telephony infrastructure, gets the relationship. That’s how you make money from distribution.

What to Look For in Hotel Voice AI

When selecting AI phone call software for a hospitality facility, the checklist of basic features (24/7 availability, taking messages, basic FAQs) may be a good starting point, but not a decision framework itself. The questions to ask would be:

• Does AI for tour operators integrate with your particular PMS system, or does it rely on manual data updates to remain up-to-date?
• Is it capable of handling changes to reservations and not just making new ones?
• What languages can it operate in, and how well not only translating answers but speaking fluently?
• How does it deal with calls that need a human decision and how seamless is the transition to a human representative?
• Can it track guests’ preferences and notify your front desk about them prior to future conversations?

The hotels that are going to benefit most from such technologies are not those that are using this technology to decrease their staff. It’s rather those that use it to increase the capacity of their staff, taking care of all the volume, the language barrier and the out-of-hour calls that they cannot take right now, leaving humans to focus on those times where humans are required.

The phone call between a curious visitor and a hotel has not changed much over time. What has changed is the ability to ensure this call is successful no matter when it is made, which language is spoken by the client, and how busy the front desk is at any point in time. This is the real story behind the technology used in phone calls by the hotel industry.

Conclusion: The Call Hasn’t Changed The Infrastructure Has

Hotels have always relied on conversations. A customer receiving answers is more likely to choose the hotel, repeat their stay, and even recommend the place to others. The inability to receive relevant information from the hotel usually means that a customer turns elsewhere.

The difference lies not in the importance of conversations, but in the scale at which they take place. Guests of hotels today may use services from various regions, in various languages, through any booking platform, and at different phases of their travel experience. It simply becomes impossible for receptionists to be available all the time to answer all questions.

AI call software is not meant to disrupt the hospitality industry. AI call software is meant to make sure the conversations still take place despite any circumstances. It is in this way that AI helps the industry of hospitality not by answering more calls, but by enabling conversations.