Chat widget
Floating button, bottom-right of the page. Streams responses in real time. Feels like a message from the guesthouse, not a help-desk ticket.
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AI Chat Agent · Hospitality
A Cotswolds B&B stopped losing bookings at breakfast
A Cotswolds bed and breakfast was losing 3–5 reservations every week — not from lack of rooms, but from lack of response. We built them a 24/7 AI guest assistant that answers instantly, escalates intelligently and sounds exactly like them.
3–5 / week
Bookings recovered
24 / 7
Instant coverage
< 2 sec
Response time
The Problem
Five hours a day, no one was home
The owners run all nine rooms themselves — breakfast service, check-ins, housekeeping, everything. During the morning rush (7:30–10:30am) and after 9pm, the phone went unanswered and inbox replies lagged by hours.
Guests asking about parking, dietary options or pet policy couldn't get a fast answer, so they booked elsewhere. The owners estimated they were losing 3–5 reservations a week — not from lack of availability, but from lack of someone at the desk.
Before
- Enquiries during breakfast sat unanswered for hours
- After-9pm coverage: zero
- 20–30 min/day answering the same FAQ emails
- 3–5 bookings/week lost to response lag
The Solution
A 24/7 guest assistant that sounds like the guesthouse
We built a branded AI chat widget embedded directly on the guesthouse website. Powered by Claude Haiku — fast and cost-efficient — it answers guest questions instantly at any hour, using a live FAQ database the owners control themselves through a simple admin panel.
When something falls outside what the AI can confidently answer — room availability, special requests, event enquiries — it captures the guest's name, email and message, and routes it directly to the owners by email. No guest drops off without a path forward.
Smart escalation
Claude signals when a query is out of scope. A contact form appears before the guest leaves — name, email and message sent straight to the owners.
Admin panel
FAQs are editable at /admin — add, update or remove entries in a simple form. Changes go live immediately. No code, no deployment needed.
In practice
How we solved it
The parts that actually needed thinking
Sounding like the guesthouse, not a chatbot
Getting the AI to write in the warm, unhurried voice of a small Cotswolds guesthouse — not a corporate help desk — took careful prompt engineering. The constraint: never break character, never say "I'm just an AI", always use "we" and "our guests". We tested against 20+ real guest questions before the tone felt right.
Knowing when to give up gracefully
The widget needed to answer confidently when it could and hand off cleanly when it couldn't — without hallucinating availability or inventing policies. Claude returns a structured signal when a query falls out of scope; the frontend catches it and shows a contact form before the guest disengages.
Admin a non-technical owner can run
The owners needed to update FAQs themselves — no Git, no deployment, no code editor. The answer: a password-protected /admin panel that writes directly to the live FAQ store. They can add, edit or remove an entry in two minutes from their phone, and it reflects instantly on the live chat.
Cost that works at nine rooms
A nine-room guesthouse can't absorb enterprise AI costs. Claude Haiku processes a full guest conversation for a fraction of a cent — cheap enough that running the widget 24/7 costs less per month than a single unanswered booking. The build was designed around that constraint from day one.
The Outcome
What changed after go-live
Before
- Enquiries during breakfast sat unanswered for hours
- Zero coverage after 9pm
- 20–30 min/day answering the same FAQ emails
- 3–5 bookings/week lost to slow responses
After
- Every FAQ answered in under 2 seconds, any hour
- Complex enquiries captured and emailed with guest contact details
- FAQ updates take 2 minutes from any device
- Breakfast service no longer interrupted by the phone
3–5 / week
Bookings recovered
5 hrs / day
Coverage added
2 min
To update any FAQ
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