Start With The Front Office

If you are a hotelier working on your AI strategy, I will save you months of deliberation. Start with the front office. Not revenue management. Not distribution. The front office.

I recognize this might sound underwhelming since the front office technically falls under operations and is therefore treated as a cost center. But trust me when I say this: this is the winning play long-term.

After spending months on-property deploying AI and watching it work in real time, I am convinced the front office is the highest-leverage function for hotels to implement AI. Not because "missed calls can mean missed revenue" or "guests expect instant answers" (yes, these are nice to have), but because the front office is where your commercial intelligence is born. And that is a need to have.

Reframing the front office

The front office acts as the primary point of contact for guests throughout their entire journey. This means that any digital interaction — a call, chat, email, or website visit — between a guest and the property flows through here. The more interactions hotels have, the higher their chances of converting them into revenue.

The other side of the story is that hotels spend a lot of money to acquire these interactions. They shell out thousands of dollars each month on marketing and industry events in order to drive traffic towards their property. While amplifying reach is great, this model also represents a sunk cost that often gets overlooked: still paying for the interactions that do not convert.

As we have outlined before, Anana is built to extract value from those unconverted interactions so that hotels can eventually convert them. It is this reframing that positions the front office as an underutilized direct booking source and a prime use case for AI.

The graveyard of failed agents

Alright so maybe you start believing what I'm preaching, but then you remember that hotels (and their guests) have been burned by AI agents.

If you sat through a voice agent or chatbot demo in the last two years, you saw the polished version. Then you heard from a colleague who actually deployed one and watched it fall apart. The agent told a guest a room was available when it was not, or confirmed a booking that was never actually made.

These are hallucinations, and they are more common than vendors let on. But the deeper problem is what happens after. The agents were built, deployed, and abandoned to "continuously learn." Except no one ever closed the loop, so the agent that was hallucinating on day one is still hallucinating six months later. The only difference is that now it has six months of bad interactions stacked behind it. That is the set-and-forget problem, and it is why hotels stop trusting these systems.

All of that is real. But not everyone is aware of the root cause.

The actual mistake was a category error. Everyone who built these agents built them to handle conversations: answer the question, close the ticket, resolve the call, move on. They optimized for making the conversation go away so that teams could "focus on what matters most." While this sounds great in theory, it ignores the fact that a system designed to make conversations go away is, by definition, a system that ends after the conversation. Anana's unique value proposition is that it goes beyond the conversation by analyzing interactions and repurposing them for commercial intelligence.

The compounding effect

So what does this actually look like? Start with one interaction. A guest calls about a specific room type for a specific weekend, hears the rate, and hangs up without booking. Most systems log that as a call that did not convert and move on. But that is not a dead end. It is a demand signal with everything attached: the dates they wanted, the room they were after, and the price that made them walk. One interaction, and you already know something about your market that no rate report would have told you.

Now multiply that across every call, chat, and inquiry, across every property, every day. This is the part that should change how you sequence every AI decision you make next.

The front office is not the destination. It is layer zero, and everything compounds from it. The data you capture this month becomes the upselling strategy you can measure next quarter, instead of building offers and hoping. The complaints clustering today become the operational fix before they turn into reviews. And the intent signals coming through the front office reach your revenue manager before the comp set has any idea.

Here is a real example, from one of our first portfolios. In the first three months, we watched a single source market grow from 10% of total inbound calls to more than 20%. That is a real demand signal building inside the conversations, showing the marketing team where to set their next target.

Zoom in and focus on a single segment; zoom out and see how it moves the entire portfolio. None of this is reachable without the foundation. And the foundation is the front office.

Start where the signal is

The interactions are happening right now, and you are already paying for them. Every call, every chat, every after-hours inquiry your team handles today is commercial intelligence, and if you are like most hotels, you are resolving it and throwing it away in the same motion.

You do not have to. You already own the richest data source in your building. The only real question is whether you are going to start capturing it, or keep telling yourself it was just the back office.

If you run two or more properties and your guest conversations still evaporate the second they end, you are not behind on AI. You are behind on your own data. We can show you how you can leverage it.

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