What is Conversation Intelligence for Hotels?

At Skift Global Forum in New York this September, Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti shared a figure many hoteliers will recognise: about 25% of calls to hotels normally go unanswered. At a typical Wyndham property, that’s out of roughly 4,000 calls a year. As Skift reported from the forum, the group’s voice agent now answers every call at participating hotels, and a higher share of those calls are converting to bookings.

 

That’s encouraging for every independent hotel. A problem many of us have lived with for years can be solved. And once every call is answered, a second opportunity opens up. Each conversation becomes something you can learn from.

 

We started Coir Consulting as a hospitality digital consultancy, and the guest’s first contact with a property has been at the centre of our work ever since. So let’s look at what conversation intelligence means for a hotel, why it makes your team more valuable, and why the timing suits independent and boutique properties so well.

 

IBM describes conversation intelligence as using AI-powered tools to analyse business conversations and extract insights you can act on. For a hotel, the phone is the natural place to start, because callers share more than you might expect.

 

Think about what a caller tells you in a few minutes:

 

 

Each of those is a signal. Across hundreds of calls, they show you which questions keep coming up, which rooms people ask about and where enquiries slip away.

 

Academic research backs the value of measuring enquiries closely. A 2025 research note in the International Journal of Hospitality Management followed a year of booking requests to a 42-room leisure hotel in Porto Azzurro, Italy. The authors found that conversion rates move with demand through the seasons, and that they can be modelled and improved. Their data came from website requests, yet the principle carries over to the phone: once you can see your enquiries clearly, you can do something about them.

 

This is where we come in. ääni is the revenue recovery and conversation intelligence platform for hospitality, and the two halves of that description do different jobs. ääni Voice, live today, answers every call and works from your PMS’s live record, starting with ääni for Mews. It also logs and transcribes every call, so you can see what guests ask for. ääni Coach, in build for commercial launch in 2027, will score answered calls against your property’s own standards and help your team improve.

 

A phone call may be the only moment before arrival when a guest explains their plans in their own words. That makes it some of the richest guest insight a hotel holds.

 

Insight is only worth having when it reaches the people who can use it, which brings us to your team.

 

Some of the best service moments in a hotel happen when one person hands a guest to another: the receptionist who fetches the duty manager, the concierge who walks a guest to the restaurant.

 

Good AI on the phone should work the same way. A well-timed handoff to a member of your team shows the guest you were listening, so it belongs in the service design from day one.

 

Guests agree. In a Gartner survey of 3,566 B2B and B2C customers, conducted in February and March 2026, 87% said it’s essential for companies using generative AI to provide an option to reach a live agent. Half said their interactions are easier when companies use it.

 

Wyndham’s results suggest guests value that option more than they use it. Once its voice agent answered every call, only 15% of guests asked to speak to a person.

 

So most calls are handled straight away, and the ones that reach your team are the calls that benefit from their judgement: the anniversary weekend, the accessibility question, the guest who’s had a difficult stay and wants to be heard.

 

Service leaders are planning around this. A Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders in October 2025 found that nearly 80% of organisations plan to move at least some agents into new roles. It also found that 84% of leaders plan to add new skills to the agent role.

 

Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta summed up the mood at the same Skift event: “In the end, we’re a business of people serving people.”

 

A short afterthought on coaching. General feedback is hard to act on. Pointing a team member to the exact moment a guest hesitated over a rate gives them something specific to work with, and that’s the kind of support ääni Coach is being built to give.

 

If guests and service leaders are both pointing the same way, the next question is timing.

 

Budgets are moving first. A Gartner survey of 199 service and support leaders, run in April and May 2026, found that spending on AI has increased by 38%, while overall service and support budgets have grown by just 2%. Organisations are choosing to put new money into AI-supported conversations even when the wider budget is tight.

 

There’s still plenty of room to lead, too. In McKinsey’s State of AI in 2025 survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said their organisations had not yet begun scaling AI across the enterprise. Large groups often work through long pilots and layers of sign-off. An independent hotel, with one owner and one front office, can usually decide and act much faster.

 

Your team is the strongest reason to start now. Hospitality vacancies fell 7% year on year, from 75,000 to 70,000 in the three months to September 2026, according to ONS figures reported by The Morning Advertiser. Meanwhile, the National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour in April 2026, as UKHospitality has highlighted. When each person on shift carries more of the guest experience, a tool that takes routine calls off their hands and helps them get better at the rest makes a real difference.

 

If your guests explained exactly what they wanted every day, how much of it would reach your team?

 

Regulation is heading in a direction that suits hotels who are open with their guests. Since 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act’s Article 50 transparency rules have required AI systems that interact directly with people to be designed so those people know they’re dealing with AI. For properties across EMEA, saying so at the start of a call is simply good hospitality: honest, clear and respectful of the guest’s choice.

 

Some of the most useful feedback your hotel receives may never appear in a review. It arrives every day by phone, from guests sharing their plans, their worries and what would persuade them to book.

 

The route forward is straightforward. Answer every call with ääni Voice, so no enquiry ends in voicemail. Then, as ääni Coach arrives in 2027, let those same conversations help your team lift their own standards, one call at a time.

 

What would your team do with every conversation working in its favour?

 

To see what unanswered calls could be costing your property, try our missed-call revenue calculator, or book a demo and hear ääni Voice for yourself.