Foreword from the founders
Hey, I’m Chanel, a co-founder of Sorino. The thing our team kept seeing was not dramatic. It was quiet. The phone rings during service, everyone has their hands full, and it rings out. A booking walks. An enquiry sits in the inbox until Tuesday. Nobody did anything wrong. There just were not enough hands.
This short report is about that gap: what UK hospitality loses to the calls and messages it cannot get to, why it is getting harder to answer them, and how venues are covering those hours without hiring anyone new. Where we quote a number it is a real, sourced number. Where we describe what happens on the floor, we say plainly that it is what operators tell us, not a survey.
Section one
The squeeze that leaves the phone ringing
Hospitality is not short of demand. It is short of hands. The sector employs around 3.5 million people and is the UK’s third largest employer, yet it is running well below the capacity it needs, and the costs of staffing up have climbed.
Source: UKHospitality Quarterly Members’ Survey, 2025.
Read those two together and you get the shape of the problem. There is rarely a spare person to sit by the phone, and every booking that slips away hurts more when the margin is already gone. It is why the phone, the inbox and the messages are the first things to go unanswered when a venue is busy.
Source: UKHospitality Quarterly Members’ Survey, 2025.
So the pressure is not easing. Fewer hands, tighter margins, and the same phone ringing at the same busy moments. Hospitality is a top five employer in every region of the UK, accounting for up to 12% of the local workforce, which makes this a national pattern, not a handful of unlucky venues.
Section two
What a missed call actually costs
None of this shows up as a line on the accounts, which is exactly why it goes unfixed for years. Here is what operators tell us a missed call or an unread message really is. These are observed patterns from the floor, not survey figures.
- At a hotel, a missed reservation call is often a room booked through one of the big booking sites instead, at a commission, rather than direct.
- At a restaurant, it is a table that stays empty on a Saturday, or a private-dining enquiry taken by the venue down the road.
- At a bar or food-led venue, it is a big group that booked somewhere else, and an Instagram message that sat unread for two days.
- After hours, it is the call that goes to voicemail and never calls back.
The common thread is simple. The guest tried to reach you, on their channel, at their moment, and no one was free to answer. The booking did not wait.
Section three
What answers the phone when your people cannot
The fix is not another member of staff you cannot afford or find. It is one shared knowledge base, the venue’s own menus, hours, allergens and policies, feeding the channels guests actually use, so every one answers the same way.
| Channel | What it does | The hour it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | Answers calls in the venue’s tone, takes and confirms the booking, captures party size and dietary detail, escalates to a human when it should. | Mid-service, after hours, the second everyone’s hands are full. |
| Reads the inbox by intent not order, replies fast to enquiries and events, sends confirmations and deposit requests. | The Monday-morning backlog, the private-dining enquiry that cannot wait. | |
| Chat | A branded website and WhatsApp concierge that answers menu and availability questions and locks in the booking in-flow. | The moment a guest is still deciding. |
| Social | Answers Instagram and Facebook messages before the lead goes cold. | The message that used to sit unread for two days. |
| Knowledge Base | The shared brain all four draw on, so every channel sounds like this venue. | Always, underneath everything. |
It is not four bots. It is one source of truth, four front doors, and a clean hand-off to your team the moment a conversation needs a human.
Section four
What we will not let it do
The fastest way to lose an operator’s trust is to over-promise, so the guardrails are part of the product.
- Allergen questions are answered only from your written record, or handed to a person. No guessing on anything safety-critical.
- It sounds like the venue, because it reads from the venue’s own words. Not a generic script.
- A human takes over the moment something is sensitive or unusual, like a complaint or a tricky large booking. The agent knows the edge of what it can handle.
- Everything is on the record. Full transcripts, clear permissions, clear escalation rules.
- It works alongside the team, it does not replace the host or the maitre d’. Coverage, not redundancy.
Section five
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 about allergens, opening hours or a booking, and hear how it answers, before anyone talks about a bigger commitment. If it passes, the next step is a short trial with clear measures agreed up front:
- How fast guests get a first answer across the channels you choose.
- After-hours coverage, the calls and messages that used to go unanswered.
- Enquiry capture, the bookings and events that used to leak away.
Low risk is the whole point. You see it working on your own venue, in your own voice, before you commit to anything bigger.
Sources
We do not publish a figure unless it is real and attributable. The numbers in this report are:
- 69% of hospitality businesses operating at or below 85% of required capacity, and one in three operating at a loss. 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 employment. UKHospitality Quarterly Members’ Survey, 2025. Same source.
- Hospitality employs around 3.5 million people, is the UK’s third largest employer, and accounts for up to 12% of every regional workforce. UKHospitality, Economic Contribution of Hospitality. ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/economic-contribution-of-hospitality
The “what a missed call costs” lines are observed operator patterns, not survey data, and no venue names, deployment counts or results are claimed.