AI & technology
What guests ask a small hotel’s assistant
Working notes on the questions guests put to a hotel assistant, and which ones it should hand to a person.
Publication details
- Type
- finding
- Topic
- AI & technology
- Date
- In progress
- Reading time
- About 3 minutes
- Authors and partners
- TELORIMA · no partner organization
In short
- We expect check-in times and breakfast to lead the questions guests ask.
- In early conversations, owners said most guest questions arrive after the desk closes.
- We think guests will trust an answer more when it shows where it came from.
What we expect guests to ask.
This is a working draft. We are collecting the questions guests put to small hotels — by message, by email and at the desk — and sorting them by topic.
The owners we have spoken to name the same few: check-in and check-out times, breakfast, parking, and whether a room can be changed. We expect those to make up most of what an assistant is asked. We will only say so once we have counted.
The harder part is deciding what an assistant should not answer. A refund, a complaint or an unusual request goes to a person. This draft is where we work out where that line falls.
Figure
Guest questions, by topic
The chart for this section will group guest questions by topic. It comes once the notes are complete and the questions are counted.1
Limitations
- What these notes cannot show yet
- These are notes from conversations with a handful of hotel owners, not a count of real guest messages. Nothing here says how often a question is asked, or how well an assistant answers it.
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Contributions
- Research
- Our AI team, from conversations with small-hotel owners.
- Writing
- Our AI research lead.
- Review
- Our hospitality lead reads it before it is published.