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A Sorino.Ai field guide, 2026

The Missed-Booking Audit

A 15-point check for UK hospitality operators: hotels, restaurants and bars

Sorino · Hotels, restaurants and bars · 2026

Foreword from the founders

Hey. I want to be straight about why we made this, because it isn't a sales sheet.

The way our team learns is by listening to operators. And the same thing keeps coming up, across hotels, restaurants and bars, whatever the size. It's not the bookings you lose that hurt. It's the ones you never knew you had.

The enquiry that comes in at half ten at night. The phone that rings out while the floor's flat out. The Instagram DM you see two days later. None of those land on a report as "a missed booking." They just quietly go to the place that answered first. You can't fix a leak you can't see.

So we wrote this as a way to see it. It's fifteen honest questions about where a booking can slip out of your business without leaving a mark. Run through it, tick what's true, and you'll have a map of exactly where you're leaking, whether or not you ever talk to us.

We built Sorino to plug these gaps, and I'll show you how at the end. But the checklist stands on its own. Use it either way.

Chanel

How to use this

Go through the fifteen checks for your kind of venue. Tick every one that is true of your business today. Every tick is a place a booking can leave without a trace. At the end, add them up and read the short score guide. Be honest, it only helps if it's true.

The squeeze behind all of this

Two things are pulling in opposite directions, and the gap between them is where bookings fall through.

More unanswered hours, less patience. That is the whole problem in two lines.

Section 1: Hotels

The after-hours gap: the desk clocks off, the enquiries don't.

  1. After-hours enquiries go to voicemail. Calls and messages that arrive once the desk is unmanned are not answered until the morning.
  2. You have no single view across properties. Guest conversations sit in different inboxes and systems per site, with nothing joining them up.
  3. Direct bookings leak to the big booking sites. When you can't answer fast, the guest books through a channel that costs you commission.
  4. The overnight window is your best direct window, and your least covered. The 9pm to 7am enquiries are high-intent and almost entirely unstaffed.
  5. Nobody chases the enquiry before the guest chooses. A message taken overnight waits for a callback that comes after the guest has already booked elsewhere.

What operators tell us (illustrative, not attributed): "The phone rang out again while we were doing breakfast." · "After-hours enquiries just go to voicemail." · "We're leaking direct bookings to the big booking sites and the commission with them." · "We've no single view across the properties."

Section 2: Restaurants

The mid-service gap: the booking you never knew you missed.

  1. The line is engaged during service. When you're on the pass, the phone goes to a busy tone and the caller is gone.
  2. Website and email enquiries sit overnight. A booking request at 9:40pm waits until someone opens the inbox tomorrow.
  3. Instagram DMs are seen days late. The regular asking for a table on Saturday gets a reply after they've booked somewhere else.
  4. Occasion and dietary detail is captured inconsistently. When it's busy, the "it's our anniversary" or the allergy note doesn't always reach the kitchen.
  5. No one is answering when you're closed. The hours the restaurant is dark are hours enquiries still arrive, and nothing catches them.

What operators tell us (illustrative, not attributed): "I'm the chef, the host and the marketing department." · "By the time we ring them back they've booked somewhere else." · "The DMs just pile up, we see them two days later." · "It has to sound like us, not a robot."

On allergens: any tool answering for a restaurant must answer allergens from the record, on the record, and hand straight to a human the moment anything is ambiguous. That line is never improvised. (See governance, below.)

Section 3: Bars and food-led venues

The peak-and-function gap: the big enquiry that sat unread.

  1. Function and private-hire enquiries wait. The "we're 18 for a birthday, what's the package" message lands mid-service and isn't answered properly for hours.
  2. The phone never stops at peak, and can't be answered at peak. Friday-night bookings arrive at the exact moment the floor is heaving.
  3. DMs are the first step in booking now, and they go unread. The party plans in your Instagram inbox while your team runs service.
  4. No-shows because confirmations and reminders don't reliably go out. Bookings aren't reconfirmed, so people don't turn up and don't call.
  5. The same questions eat the floor's time all day. "Are you open Sunday, do you do gluten-free, can I bring the dog," answered by hand, over and over.

What operators tell us (illustrative, not attributed): "The phone never stops on a Friday." · "By the time we ring them back they've booked somewhere else." · "They don't turn up and don't even call." · "We can't justify someone just to sit and answer the phone."

Your score

Remember: these aren't lost covers you can count. They're covers you never knew were on the table. That's what makes the leak so easy to live with, and so worth closing.

What good looks like: one Knowledge Base, four channels

The fix isn't another inbox for someone to watch. It's one shared Knowledge Base, your menus, rooms, rates, hours, allergens and policies, feeding four channels that all answer the same way:

ChannelWhat it does
VoiceAnswers the phone 24/7 in your voice, books from real availability, captures party size, dietary and occasion detail.
ChatA website concierge that answers menu, availability and policy questions and locks in the booking in-flow.
EmailReads the inbox by intent, replies to function and private-dining enquiries fast, sends confirmations and reminders.
SocialAnswers Instagram and DMs before the lead goes cold, keeps the account warm, watches reviews.

All four read from the one Knowledge Base, so a hotel group sounds like the group, and a bar sounds like the bar, not a call centre.

What we will not let AI do (governance)

Honesty is the whole product, so the guardrails matter as much as the features.

Getting started: a fixed-scope pilot

We don't do open-ended rollouts. A defined pilot, live in weeks not months, with clear measures agreed up front:

You build your venue's agent live on the site first, and watch it answer, before anyone talks about a pilot.

Sources

Every figure in this guide comes from UKHospitality and is listed here with its source.

Everything else here is an observed pattern, not survey data. Every checklist item and every "what operators tell us" line is a pattern we hear from operators and illustrative phrasing, not a research statistic. They are prompts for honest self-assessment, not measured findings. No venue names, deployment counts or results are claimed, because we do not publish figures we cannot source.

Sorino.Ai is the hospitality face of the Lucy / KwickBlocks platform. Build your venue's agent, live, at Sorino.ai.