Exclusive Feature: If you run a small hotel, someone has probably tried to sell you an AI that answers the phone, and the pitch may have opened with a figure about how many calls hotels miss.

That figure might be true for somebody. The trouble is that it isn't yours. Before you pay for anything, I think you should spend one week finding out how many calls your own hotel misses, when they come in and what the callers wanted.

It costs nothing. It takes a few minutes a day. And it tells you whether you have a problem worth paying to fix.

Why your own count matters

A sales pitch can only give you averages. Your hotel isn't an average. A 15-room guesthouse in a beach town has a different phone day from a 40-room business hotel near a station. One gets calls about late check-in and airport transfers. The other gets calls from companies booking rooms for staff. Even two hotels on the same street can look nothing alike, because one has a person on the desk until midnight and the other locks the door at nine.

So the question isn't whether hotels miss calls. Of course they do. The question is which calls you miss, and whether anyone would have booked if you'd picked up.

How to run the count

Pick an ordinary week. Not the week of a festival, and not the quietest week of the year.

Make a simple sheet with these columns. Date. Time the call came in. Answered or missed. If missed, did they leave a message? Did you call back, and when? What did the caller want? Did it turn into a booking?

If your phone system keeps a log of missed calls, start there and copy it into the sheet each morning. If it doesn't, put a printed sheet next to the phone and ask whoever is on the desk to fill in a line for every call. If guests ever ring the owner's mobile, count those calls too. They're the easiest ones to forget.

The "what did they want" column is the one people skip. Don't skip it. For a missed call you won't always know, but a voicemail, a callback or a WhatsApp message a few minutes later will sometimes tell you. Keep the labels plain, such as new booking, existing guest, directions, sales call or unknown.

At the end of the week, sort the missed calls by hour and by label. You don't need a spreadsheet formula. A tally on paper works fine.

Reading the results

Picture three hotels after one week.

The first missed 4 calls out of 90. Two were sales calls. One was a guest asking about parking who rang back ten minutes later. This hotel doesn't have a phone problem, and a vendor who says otherwise is selling to someone else.

The second missed 25 calls, and almost all of them came between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., when the one person on the desk was busy checking people in. Most callers left no message. That's a real gap.

But look at what the callers wanted before you decide how to close it. If they were mostly asking whether a room was free this weekend, those calls are worth money, and a fix of some kind makes sense. That fix could be a person, a better rota or software.

The third missed plenty of calls, but most came from guests already staying or already booked. Late check-in, the code for the side door, whether breakfast starts at seven. These guests will still arrive, but some of them will arrive annoyed. A clear voicemail message and one good email before arrival might deal with most of them. (I'd test that before buying anything bigger.)

The cheap fixes to try first

Before any software, try the boring things for a week and run the count again.

Re-record your voicemail. Say the hotel's name, say when someone will call back, and give the one or two answers people ask for most, such as check-in time or how to reach you on WhatsApp. Then actually call back within an hour. A message that promises a callback is only useful if somebody makes it.

Send the information before guests need it. If many calls ask for the door code, parking or directions, put those in the confirmation or in a message the day before arrival.

Look at the busy hour. If one person checks in guests and answers the phone at the same time every evening, a small change to the rota can help more than a new tool. That's a dull answer, I know.

What to ask a vendor if you still need one

If your count shows real booking calls going unanswered at hours you can't staff, then automation might be worth paying for. At that point your sheet is the most useful thing you can bring to a sales call.

Ask the vendor to walk through how its system would have handled your actual missed calls, label by label. Ask what happens when a caller wants a person. Ask how you'll see which calls it answered and what it told each caller. Ask who updates its prices and policies when yours change. And ask for a price based on your count, not on an average.

A vendor who can't talk about your numbers isn't a good fit, however good the demo looks.

This week

Print the sheet, or make one on your phone. Tell the team why you're doing it, so nobody feels watched. Count every call for seven days and write down what each caller wanted. Sort the missed ones by hour. Then fix the cheapest thing first and count again.

The answer might be that you need help at night. It might be a better voicemail message. Either way, you'll know.

By Iskander Nekkaz - Le Roux - Exclusive for 4Hoteliers.com

Iskander Nekkaz - Le Roux is a two-time Stanford graduate (BA economics, MA public policy), an automation engineer and the founder of BonsAI Luxury, which builds guest messaging and follow-up systems for boutique hotels and villas. bonsai.luxury