Built by hoteliers, for hoteliers
Lobby Engine answers your hotel’s phone day and night and chats with guests on your website. It answers from your hotel’s own information, takes booking and restaurant requests, answers guests in their own language — and when a guest asks for a person, puts them through or takes a call-back.
The problem
Because the person who should answer is serving breakfast, cleaning a room, trimming the garden, helping in the kitchen or standing in line at the grocery store. The phone rings — hopefully non-stop — and every ring lands at the worst possible moment.
A guest wants a room for next month, but you are not at the computer and can’t check availability. Someone wants to know if they can arrive after midnight, but your hands are full and you ask them to call back. Most of them never do.
Or you solved it the expensive way: one employee for every task, and a business that struggles to break even because of it.
What it handles
Everything a great front-desk employee does on the phone — at 3 p.m. and at 3 a.m.
Dates, room, number of guests and contact details, collected during the call or chat and sent straight to you, so you confirm against your own calendar.
A late arrival, an early check-in, a table in your restaurant: the guest’s request in their own words, with a name and a phone number or e-mail, passed to you to confirm.
Check-in times, parking, pets, the best beach, the pharmacy that opens on Sunday. Grounded in your hotel’s own information, so it knows more than your best employee.
The same concierge sits on your website as a chatbot, answering visitors day and night and taking booking requests — from the same information as the phone.
Guests call in Spanish, German, Arabic or Turkish and get answered in their own language, without you hiring a multilingual night shift.
When a caller asks for someone, it puts them through to your hotel’s direct number, or takes their name and number so you can call back. In an emergency it tells the caller to hang up and dial 112.
After hours
Yes, when they ask for one. Lobby Engine answers what it can, puts a caller who asks for a person through to your hotel’s direct number if you have set one, and otherwise takes their number so the hotel can call back.
Guest locked out of room 12
Put through: the guest asked for a person and reached the hotel.
Breakfast and parking question
Handled: nobody was disturbed.
Website chat
Yes. Visitors who would never call get answers right on your site, at any hour — and you get the booking request.
Booking request sent to the hotel.
With or without a front desk
You wear every hat. Lobby Engine takes the phone off your belt, so a booking call never interrupts breakfast service — and never gets lost because of it.
Every call answered the same way, at busy times and at night. Your team spends its hours on the guests at the desk instead of on the phone.
Costs
Lobby Engine does not replace everyone, and it shouldn’t. Hospitality is people. What it replaces are the hours spent on the phone — the night shift that mostly waits for calls, the extra person you schedule just in case the phone rings.
Fewer hours on the rota and no missed bookings means more is left at the end of the month. Use the calculator on the pricing page to see what that looks like for your hotel.
Setup
If you can fill in a booking form, you can set up Lobby Engine.
Start from your website address, or fill in your hotel yourself if you have no website. Setting up and testing is free.
It reads your website, including the PDFs linked on it, such as house rules or menus. Tell it the rest in plain words, like your local tips.
Choose how guests reach a person: the direct number calls are put through to, and the mobile that gets a text about call-backs.
Paste the chat into your website and go live. For the phone, ask for a number in your dashboard; our team replies within one working day. A local number in Germany, Austria or Greece is set up by hand, with no fixed date. Once the number is ready, your hotel’s number forwards to it, so guests keep calling the number they know.
I own two hotels. I know what it is like to carry plates to a table while the phone rings in the office — and to know that it was probably a booking. I built Lobby Engine because I needed it myself.
FAQ
Yes, as booking requests. It takes the dates, room and contact details and sends the request straight to you to confirm. It does not see your live availability, so you confirm the room yourself.
Lobby Engine speaks 31 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. It answers in the language the guest speaks.
Lobby Engine does not decide what is an emergency. It tells a caller in an emergency to hang up and dial 112, puts a caller who asks for a person through to your direct number if you set one, and otherwise takes their number for a call-back and lets you know by e-mail, and by text if you add a mobile.
Yes. Guests keep calling the number on your website and booking profiles: you forward it to the assistant’s phone line, which every plan includes. You ask for a number for that line in your dashboard, even before you go live; our team replies within one working day and sets it up with you, and the line answers once you are live. In Germany, Austria and Greece a local number is set up by hand, may need documents from your hotel and has no fixed date. If your hotel has its own phone system (PBX) or SIP provider, we connect the assistant to it on request. Until the line is ready, guests reach the assistant in the chat and by voice on your website.
It says so honestly instead of guessing. In the chat it gives the guest your hotel’s phone or e-mail, if you have added one, on the phone it offers to take a message, and the question is kept for you in your dashboard; questions from the night also go into your morning summary.
Yes. The same concierge answers visitors in a chat on your website, from the same hotel information and in every major language. It is included in every plan.
No. It takes over phone duty, so you need fewer hours on the phone and your team can focus on the guests in front of them.
Set it up, talk to it as a guest would, typed or spoken, and hear your hotel answered the way you would answer it yourself.