Most operators still think of the phone line as admin, yet a 2025 analysis of millions of full‑service restaurant calls found that around 71% of inbound calls are directly linked to revenue activities like reservations, orders and events, according to recent restaurant call studies. If most of your calls are money trying to reach you, your main number starts to look a lot like a sales channel that has its own profit and loss statement.
This article looks directly at that hidden P&L. It unpacks where revenue slips away, what changes when an AI concierge like Coir’s ääni sits on your phone line, and how a GM or owner can model the impact over a few months in very practical terms. Along the way, it leans on large call datasets and real hospitality case studies, so you are not guessing in the dark.
The aim is simple. By the end, you will be able to look at your phone number with the same scrutiny you already apply to your booking engine or bar revenue, with a concrete sense of how AI call handling can move the numbers in your favour.
Your Busiest Salesperson Has No KPIs
Across UK businesses, 2025 research on small and mid‑sized enterprises suggests that missed calls average around a quarter of all inbound calls, with some segments seeing even higher non‑answer rates. In restaurants, recent operational analyses by industry consultants highlight venues where close to half of peak‑time daily calls never reach a human, particularly around service rushes.
At the same time, hospitality‑focused reports on AI answering services note that a clear majority of guests still reach for the phone when they have a question or want to reserve, even when online booking is available. The same work cites survey data indicating that a large share of customers will not try a second time if their first call goes unanswered, turning a simple ring into a lost visit more often than many teams realise.
If you connect those dots, your main number behaves a lot like a high‑performing salesperson who is on the floor all day, yet you do not hold them to any visible KPIs. You know roughly how many times it rings, you sense that it is important, but you may not be measuring how many calls are revenue bearing, how many you actually pick up, and what typically happens when you do.
A useful mental model is to think in blocks of 100 calls. Out of those, a large share will be about bookings, orders or high‑value enquiries, some will never be answered, and only a subset of answered calls will convert into reserved tables, rooms or appointments. Without data, each of those steps is a guess, which means the P&L of your phone line is effectively an unmonitored cost centre, even though the intent on the other side of the call is often very strong.
Dial Tone to Deal Flow
This is where AI concierge services start to matter. Coir’s ääni sits exactly where your guests already are, on your existing phone number, offering round‑the‑clock conversational call handling that follows your own booking rules and brand style. It is configured for appointment‑driven and reservation‑heavy environments, so it can take a full booking, answer practical questions, and hand off to your team when something genuinely needs human judgment.
The impact of that kind of coverage shows up clearly in recent call studies. Just this year, a restaurant study found that venues with missed call rates around the mid‑thirties moved into the very low single digits after putting AI call handling on the line. Within the same dataset, reservation volume climbed by more than half, while revenue generated per 100 calls rose substantially as more callers got through and were handled promptly.
Hotels see similar sensitivity. When Evermore Resort opened with a lean team, its reservations line initially experienced a call abandonment rate of about 72%, meaning most callers gave up before speaking to anyone, according to a 2025 case study on HospitalityNet. By using detailed call reporting to argue for and add capacity, the resort cut abandonment by roughly 92%, which translated directly into more stays booked via the voice channel.
Voice is not marginal here. A 2025 Hospitality Benchmark Report draws on data from 5.9 million hotel calls worldwide and shows that the voice channel still plays a substantial part in direct revenue capture for hotels, even as digital booking grows. When you put that together with the restaurant findings, it becomes clear that answer rate, response time and call handling quality on the phone are genuine revenue levers, not soft service extras.
AI concierge tools like ääni effectively give you variable capacity on those levers. Instead of hiring extra headcount for every possible peak or extending shifts late into the night, you let the system absorb the unpredictable surges, particularly around service peaks and after hours. In practice, that means fewer missed calls, shorter waits and more consistent handling, while your human team can stay focused on the complex, in‑person service moments that actually need them.
To make this tangible, it helps to think about the specific places automation moves the P&L, rather than treating it as a vague efficiency gain. It raises the proportion of calls that connect at all, picks up faster than a stretched host or receptionist can, covers after hours without extra staff, and follows booking logic without fatigue, which together nudge a higher share of call intent into confirmed revenue.
Once you see the phone line in this light, it becomes easier to justify investment in AI concierge as a revenue project, not a cost‑saving exercise.
Designing Your Phone-Line P&L
If you want to get serious, you can design a simple P&L for your phone number and plug in your own numbers. A practical starting point is call volume, which most systems can already report, combined with your internal estimate of what proportion of those calls lead to bookings, orders or high‑value enquiries, taking restaurant benchmarks as a guide when needed. If you are unsure, sector data showing that a clear majority of calls carry revenue potential gives you a conservative reference point.
Next comes your best view of missed calls and abandonment. If your phone system logs this, you have a solid baseline, but if not, aggregated UK research indicating that businesses routinely miss between a quarter and two‑fifths of inbound calls gives you at least a starting range. Hospitality‑focused analyses go further and estimate that the resulting lost business can reach six‑figure sums annually for a busy venue, once you multiply missed calls by typical booking or order values.
On the quality side, contact centre benchmarks from 2024 and 2025 put best‑in‑class abandonment in the low single digits, with many operations sitting notably higher because of staffing constraints and queue times. That gives you a realistic target band for your own line: if your abandonment rate is in double figures today, simply moving closer to those benchmarks, using a mix of AI concierge capacity and focused staffing, can unlock a sizeable improvement in booked revenue per 100 calls.
Coir’s work on AI voicemail and hidden data adds another dimension. When ääni or related tooling handles or records calls rather than letting them vanish into missed call logs, you gain structured insight into what guests asked for, when they called, and how often they mention price, availability or specific experiences. Over time, that call‑level data starts to inform decisions well beyond the phone itself, from menu mix and treatment design to opening hours and rate strategy, because it reflects actual guest language at scale.
It is worth pausing on one question as you build this view. If your main number were spun out as a small standalone business, with its own conversion funnel and revenue goal, would you be content to run it without clear data on how many customers it loses each day.
When Every Ring Has a Line Item
Seen through this lens, your phone is not an old‑fashioned channel that happens to still be around, it is an active revenue driver that deserves the same analytical attention you already give to direct online bookings and partner channels. The evidence is fairly blunt: a large share of calls in hospitality are tied directly to money, many are currently missed or abandoned, and both independent studies and real properties show that improving answer rates and response times can change revenue outcomes quickly.
AI concierge services such as ääni offer a practical way to act on that reality. They sit in the path of demand guests already create, on the number they already dial, and help you catch more of that demand without stretching your team past breaking point. Over time, the transcripts and patterns they capture can do even more, feeding into decisions on staffing, product and pricing because they reveal what your guests actually ask for, in their own words and at their own pace.
So the real opportunity is not just to install another tool, but to start treating every ring as a line item on a living P&L that you can improve with intent. If you had a clear, quantified view of what each unanswered call was genuinely worth over a year, how long would you feel comfortable leaving that value to chance.