- Focus on Hospitality launched Aila, an AI receptionist for hospitality businesses
- Aila operates 24/7 handling calls and processing reservations
- Viva Brazil pilot generated £7,400 additional revenue
- The pilot recovered 60pc of front-of-house call handling time
- Aila can be set up in under 48 hours with existing phone systems
Focus on Hospitality has launched Aila, an AI receptionist purpose developed for hotels, restaurants, venues and multi-site hospitality businesses to tackle lost revenue, operational pressures and poor customer experience. Answering calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Aila ensures service teams remain focused on the guest in front of them, handling frequently asked questions, processing reservations in the booking platform and routing urgent calls to the right department. Built and customised to hospitality operations, Aila enhances business capability during busy periods and captures calls that would otherwise be lost out of hours.
Early results from a three-month pilot with an independent Brazilian steakhouse, Viva Brazil in Cardiff, contributed approximately £7,400 in additional gross revenue, while recovering approximately 60pc of the time previously spent managing front-of-house call handling. Integrating with the restaurant’s booking platform, Aila records and confirms bookings with customers and captures information like allergies, special occasions, birthdays, as well as vegan and vegetarian options, transferring this information into the table management software for service teams to access.
Aila works with a business’s existing phone system and can be set up in under 48 hours. It is available to independent hotels and groups, restaurants, venues and large multi-site hospitality businesses through Focus on Hospitality, Focus Group’s hospitality division. Focus on Hospitality is now exploring the next phase of development for Viva Brazil to also integrate in-call upselling, offering wine packages and booking extras rather than waiting until guests arrive, following the same logic booking platforms already apply to online booking flows.
Alessandra Leoni, Head of Hospitality, Focus on Hospitality by Focus Group, shared “Where businesses have had to take incredibly difficult decisions to cut costs, this has hampered performance in other ways. Aila manages this balance so teams don’t have to split their focus.”
