The Sound of Luxury Begins on the Telephone

Most researchers agree your guests form a first impression of an interaction in roughly seven seconds, and they do it using tiny slices of behaviour, not long conversations, according to research on first impressions.

 

In practice, that means a caller to your Michelin-starred restaurant has already judged your warmth, competence and care by the time you finish saying the venue name and greeting. A 2024 Nielsen Norman Group study found that 52% of the variability in how desirable a brand feels comes down to one thing: how trustworthy its tone of voice seems, while friendliness adds only another 8%, as shown in their tone-of-voice research. Put bluntly, how you sound matters more to brand desirability than how cheerful you are, and certainly more than how quickly you rattle through a script.

 

This is where voice AI gets interesting for high-end hospitality, not as a way to shave seconds off average handle time, but as a way to design those first ten seconds to consistently sound like the experience you sell, aligning with McKinsey’s analysis of AI-enabled contact centres. We will look at what psychology tells us about first impressions, why affluent guests lean towards voice for complex, emotional requests and how modern AI can be trained to hear the difference between “any table?” and “this is our night”.

 

Along the way, we will draw directly on work from Nielsen Norman Group, Zendesk, Bain & Company and real deployments such as Aiello’s AVA and The Hotels Network’s KITT, so this stays grounded in evidence, not wishful thinking.

 

Psychology and communication research have spent years showing just how quickly people make their minds up. Studies on rapid trait judgements suggest that within a few seconds, listeners infer warmth, competence and trustworthiness from minimal cues, including tone, tempo and fluency. Paralinguistics research describes these vocal elements as a constant co-channel of meaning, where pitch, rhythm and pauses carry information that sits alongside the literal words. Experiments on pauses show that longer response delays can be interpreted as reluctance or uncertainty, which lowers perceived likeability and willingness to help.

 

In those first ten seconds of a call to a Michelin-starred dining room, callers are unconsciously asking whether this sounds composed enough to handle a four-hour tasting menu and a fragile family celebration. That is why the Nielsen Norman Group finding about tone is so important: in their 2024 study, trustworthiness in tone explained 52% of brand desirability, while extra friendliness barely moved the needle. For a luxury voice AI, the goal is not chirpy efficiency but calm confidence, with a cadence that feels unhurried yet precise, closer to a seasoned maître d’ than a breezy call centre agent. 

Once you see the phone greeting as a precision tool, the obvious metric shifts from “how fast did we answer?” to “how consistently do we sound like the experience our guests are willing to fly in for”.

 

The positive news is that AI gives you a way to architect that sound and keep it consistent at 2am in February and 8pm on New Year’s Eve.

 

Most service organisations have been trained to chase “friendly efficiency”, and it makes sense in mid-market contexts where volume and speed drive satisfaction. Zendesk data, as summarised in 2025 by Dave AI, shows that 69% of consumers prefer text-based support for simple issues, while 57% prefer voice when the issue is complex. That split is revealing: guests happily tap through a chat widget to confirm parking, but they pick up the phone when something feels high stakes or emotionally loaded.

 

Bain’s 2024 work on luxury spending found that discretionary spend rebalanced towards experiences in 2023, with luxury experiences growing at about 15% compared with 3% for products, as highlighted in Bain & Company’s research on global luxury spending. Those experiences include exactly the categories you care about, from gastronomic trips to wellness-led hospitality, and they are fuelled by a search for social connection and personal treatment. Put that next to the Zendesk split and you get a clear reading: your most valuable interactions are both experience-driven and complex, the very situations where guests actively prefer to talk to someone.

 

For those moments, “friendly and fast” starts to feel slightly off, because affluent guests are buying attentiveness and ceremony as much as food or treatments. “Unhurried attentiveness” sounds different, with a slightly slower tempo, deliberate confirmations and short natural pauses to show you are really holding their request in mind, as research on conversational pauses suggests. 

Voice AI can be tuned for that, using timing profiles and turn-taking patterns that aim for comfort rather than throughput, which is a surprisingly hopeful design space once you step away from volume metrics.

 

If you listen to your own calls, you will notice there are really two kinds of enquiry. One sounds like “Do you have any availability at eight?”, and the other sounds like “We are thinking of celebrating something special, maybe next month”. The first is transactional and time-bound, the second is about creating an experience, even if the caller never uses that word. The preference data we have already covered tells us that people lean on voice for precisely these complex, emotional scenarios.

 

Luxury research from Bain and others shows that affluent consumers are shifting spend towards travel, hospitality and social events where emotional payoff matters, and they attach high expectations of personalisation to those purchases. In parallel, the Nielsen Norman Group’s tone-of-voice work shows that playful or overly casual language can actually damage trust in serious contexts, as when a humorous insurance brand feels less credible than a more serious competitor. So when someone says “We are celebrating something special”, the response cannot sound like a script written for generic bookings, because it instantly undercuts the seriousness of the moment.

 

Research on voice assistants indicates that when the assistant sounds trustworthy and appropriately warm, people are more willing to use it for complex tasks and rely on it more fully. The thought worth sitting with is this: if your AI and your team treat both types of call as identical “reservation requests”, how much loyalty, secondary spend and advocacy are you quietly giving away?

 

Turning this into something practical means paying attention to the bits of the call that never show up in a transcript: hesitations, tone shifts, the slightly confident way someone says “we come often”. Paralinguistic research shows that silent pauses and filled pauses, like “uh” or “um”, signal the speaker’s mental state and shape judgements of cooperation and willingness to help. A 2021 overview of paralinguistic features notes that these vocal properties systematically affect evaluative judgements and persuasion, which is exactly what sits underneath decisions to book, upgrade or return.

 

At the same time, Gartner expects that by 2025, 60% of organisations with Voice-of-Customer programmes will rely primarily on interaction data from voice and text, rather than old-fashioned surveys, according to Gartner research on VoC trends.

 

Hospitality is already moving here: Millennium Hotels and Resorts uses Aiello’s AVA assistant in properties across Asia to provide personalised, voice-activated in-room services, and reports both lower call volumes and enhanced perceived service quality. The Hotels Network’s KITT voice receptionist handles calls and reservations in multiple languages, positioned explicitly as a way to free human staff for nuanced, higher-value guest interactions.

 

For Michelin-level restaurants and top-tier spas, the next step is to treat paralinguistic patterns as signals to act on, not noise to ignore. That might mean configuring your voice AI so that certain vocal cues automatically trigger different behaviours, for example:

 

 

What is encouraging here is that voice AI can analyse these cues at scale and still leave space for where actual staff make the most difference, without forcing your guests through robotic menus. The interesting design challenge is less about teaching AI to say “no” nicely, and more about teaching it to know when to slow down, when to double-check a detail and when to hand the call to a person because the emotion on the line says “this really matters”.

When you bring the research together, a clear picture emerges. Psychology tells us that first impressions are fast and heavily driven by tone and timing, not just information. UX research shows that trust in your voice matters far more to brand desirability than surface friendliness.

 

Channel-preference data reveals that guests actively choose voice for the complex, emotional interactions that define luxury experiences. Luxury-market studies confirm that those experiences are where growth and loyalty are concentrated, and that affluent consumers expect a personalised, attentive journey.

 

Real deployments demonstrate that AI voicemails, AI concierges and assistants can already handle live guest contact in a way that feels personal enough for serious hospitality brands to put it front of house. The through-line is simple too: for premium restaurants, hotels and spas, voice quality has become a strategic asset, not an operational leftover.

 

Looking ahead, the venues that treat every call as a small piece of the experience, instrumented with an AI that genuinely listens for nuance, will quietly pull away from those that still see the phone as a scheduling tool.

 

So the real question is whether the way your restaurant currently sounds on the line really reflects the experience your guests are prepared to cross a city or an ocean to enjoy.