Foreword from the founders
Hey. I want to be honest about why we wrote this, because it's a bit against our own interest.
Right now a lot of hospitality software is bolting a chatbot onto something and calling it AI, and some of it is not ready to talk to your guests. It answers in a voice that isn't yours, it guesses at things it shouldn't, it takes a message instead of a booking, and the first time a guest asks it something real it struggles. When that happens in your business, it's your name on it, not the vendor's.
So before you let anything answer your guests, you should know what separates a real hospitality AI from a bolt-on bot. That's all this guide is: seven plain questions to ask any vendor, us included. If a tool can't answer these well, it isn't ready to talk to your guests.
We built Sorino to pass every one of them. But the questions stand on their own. Use them on whoever you're looking at.
Chanel
Why "just add a chatbot" keeps failing hospitality
Hospitality is not a helpdesk. It is around 3.5 million people, the UK's third-largest employer, worth about £93 billion a year, and every bit of it runs on real guests being looked after well. A guest asking about a dog-friendly table, a gluten-free set menu or a room with a cot is not a support ticket, it's the start of a booking, and it has to feel like your place from the first word.
That's exactly where bolt-on bots fall down. They're built to deflect questions, not to take bookings. They answer from a generic script, not from your menus and your policies. And they have no idea where the edge of their own knowledge is, so they guess, which in a restaurant with an allergy on the line is the one thing you can never let happen.
Two pressures make the shortcut tempting anyway:
- You cannot always staff the hours. 69% of hospitality businesses are already running at or below 85% of the capacity they need, and 70% said the April 2025 cost rises could force them to reduce the number of people they employ. When you cannot fill the rota, the phone still rings and the inbox still fills.
- Source: UKHospitality Quarterly Members' Survey, 2025.
- Guests expect an answer now. A guest with a question does not wait politely for opening hours. They message two or three places at once and book whichever one answers first. A missed call at nine in the evening and an enquiry left sitting overnight are, more often than not, a booking that has quietly gone to someone else.
So the pull to "just put a bot on it" is real. The point of this guide is to help you do it without putting your name behind something that embarrasses you.
The seven questions
Ask these of any AI you're considering, in this order.
1. Does it sound like us, or like a call centre?
A guest can tell within one sentence whether they're talking to your place or to a generic bot. The tool has to answer in your tone, off your own words, so it reads like your team wrote it. Ask to hear it answer a real question about your venue before you sign anything.
2. Where does it get its answers from?
This is the whole game. A real hospitality AI answers from one shared source of truth, your menus, rooms, rates, hours, allergens and policies, so every channel says the same thing. A bolt-on bot answers from a generic script and makes the rest up. Ask: is there one Knowledge Base behind it, or is it guessing?
3. What does it do about allergens and anything safety-critical?
There is only one acceptable answer here. It must answer allergen and dietary questions from your record, on the record, and hand straight to a human the moment anything is unclear. It must never improvise on something that can hurt a guest. If a vendor is relaxed about this, walk away.
4. Does it actually book, or just take a message?
A message someone has to chase in the morning is a booking you've probably already lost. A real tool completes the booking, from your live availability, and confirms it. Ask to watch it take a booking end to end, not just collect a phone number.
5. What happens when it doesn't know?
Good AI knows the edge of its own competence. The moment a conversation gets complicated or unusual, it should hand cleanly to a person, with the full history, so your guest never hits a wall. Ask what triggers a hand-off and how fast it happens.
6. Is everything on the record, and whose data is it?
You should be able to see every conversation, set who can do what, and know your guest data stays yours. Full transcripts, clear permissions, built for UK data protection. Ask who owns the data and how you get it out.
7. Does it work alongside your team, or try to replace them?
The warmth on the floor, the maître d', the host, the person who remembers a regular's name, that is your business, and no AI replaces it. The right tool covers the hours your people can't pick up and hands the human moments back to humans. If it's sold as a replacement for your team, it misunderstands hospitality.
How Sorino answers the seven
We'd rather show you than tell you, so the honest version:
| The question | Sorino |
|---|---|
| Sounds like us? | Answers in your venue's own voice, off your own words. |
| Where do answers come from? | One shared Knowledge Base: your menus, rooms, rates, hours, allergens and policies. |
| Allergens? | Answered from the record, on the record. Anything unclear hands straight to a human. Never improvised. |
| Books or takes a message? | Books from live availability and confirms it, on voice, chat, email and social. |
| When it doesn't know? | Clean, immediate hand-off to your team, with the full conversation. |
| On the record, whose data? | Full transcripts, clear permissions, your data stays yours, built for UK data protection. |
| Alongside or replacing? | Coverage for the hours your people can't pick up. Never the maître d' or the host. |
One Knowledge Base, four channels, a clean hand-off to your team. Not a bot bolted on the side.
What good looks like, per venue
The same seven questions land a little differently depending on what you run:
- Hotels. The test is whether it books the right room from your live availability across every property, in one voice, and gives you a single view, not another bot per site.
- Restaurants. The test is allergens and tone. It has to sound like the restaurant and be immovable on the allergen record, or it has no business answering a guest.
- Bars and food-led venues. The test is the busy moment and the big enquiry. It has to answer the function message and the Friday-night rush without pulling anyone off the floor.
Getting started: try it before you trust it
You should never have to take a vendor's word for any of this. So the route in is simple: you build your venue's agent live on the site, ask it the awkward questions yourself, and hear how it sounds, before anyone talks about a pilot.
If it passes, the next step is a fixed-scope pilot, live in weeks not months, with clear measures agreed up front:
- Does it sound like your venue to a real guest.
- Allergen and safety questions handled from the record, every time.
- Bookings completed, not messages taken.
- Clean hand-off to your team when it should.
Low risk is the whole point. You see it working on your own venue, in your own voice, before you commit to anything.
Sources
Every figure in this guide comes from UKHospitality and is linked below.
- 69% of hospitality businesses are operating at or below 85% of the capacity they need. UKHospitality Quarterly Members' Survey, 2025. ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/quarterly-members-survey
- 70% of businesses said the April 2025 cost rises could force them to reduce the number of people they employ. UKHospitality Quarterly Members' Survey, 2025. ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/quarterly-members-survey
- Hospitality employs around 3.5 million people, is the UK's third-largest employer, accounts for up to 12% of every regional workforce, and contributes about £93 billion a year. UKHospitality, Economic Contribution of Hospitality. ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/economic-contribution-of-hospitality
Everything else in this guide, the seven questions, the reasons bolt-on bots fail and the per-venue notes, is buying guidance drawn from what we see operators run into, not survey data. Those are observed patterns, not statistics. We name no venues and claim no deployment counts or results, because we do not publish figures we cannot source.
Sorino is the hospitality face of the Lucy / KwickBlocks platform. Hotels, restaurants and bars. One Knowledge Base, every channel answered, on the systems you already run. Build your venue's agent, live, at Sorino.ai.