What an AI concierge does in a hotel, and which kind fits yours.

An AI concierge is software that answers guest questions on a property's behalf, in the guest's own language, at whatever hour they are asking. That one phrase covers four different products: a speaker on a bedside table, a chat tab inside a guest app, software that talks on the telephone, and a chat window on the hotel's own website. Virtual concierge, digital concierge and concierge AI are three names for the same idea. So four products compete for one search term, and their prices are hard to compare.

One distinction decides what any of them is worth to a property, and it applies to all four. Some guest requests are answered. Some are arranged. Answering means giving back something the property has already put in writing. The breakfast window, whether the car park is free, the late check-out policy, how long the walk up from the station honestly takes. Arranging means changing something: a room held, an upgrade applied, a table reserved, a tray sent upstairs. Answering uses information the hotel already has. Arranging uses a room, an hour of your team's morning, or a table in somebody else's restaurant.

Two of them need hardware or an install before they answer anything. The other two answer from the pages already on your website. Because all four are sold against the same search term, a hotelier ends up putting a bedside device and a monthly software plan in adjacent columns of one spreadsheet, even though they do different jobs.

The word concierge promises more than most of this software can do, so it is worth being blunt about which half you are buying. A concierge in the old sense arranged things: the restaurant table, the taxi, the theatre ticket, the cake waiting in the room on somebody's birthday. Every one of those changes something outside the hotel's own web pages — a restaurant's book, a driver's evening, a kitchen's morning. Software that only answers questions changes nothing, which is why it is safe to leave with a stranger at any hour.

Answering repeats what you already published. Arranging gives away a room, an upgrade, or your team's time. Only answering is safe to leave to software.

For a hotel the line is drawn by your systems, not by anyone's opinion. Availability lives in the booking calendar or the channel manager. Rates live in a rate plan that moves with the season. An upgrade depends on what housekeeping got through this morning, and a tray depends on whether the kitchen is open and staffed. A website assistant is connected to none of those, so the honest description is short: it answers the question, then puts the request in front of a person who can act.

Ask a hotelier what a concierge is for and the answer is rarely breakfast times. It is the local knowledge. Which of the three Italians is worth it on a quiet weeknight, where a van can be left, how the walk up to the castle goes with a pushchair and a tired toddler. That knowledge is the most valuable thing a front desk holds, and the least likely to be written down anywhere.

That is the limit here, and also the opportunity. An assistant works only from your published pages, so a thin website gives thin local knowledge. Spend an afternoon writing down what your team finds itself repeating. The coffee worth the walk, the pub that takes dogs, the car park that empties in the evening, the beach that is bearable in a gale. Publish it, and those answers come back on a Sunday evening while your desk is busy with the people standing at it — in whatever language the guest typed.

What it covers is narrow and easy to describe. A website chatbot reads the pages a visitor checks before deciding — rooms, breakfast, parking, the pet policy, your access statement, the arrivals instructions — and answers strictly from them. Ask it something the property has yet to put in writing and it says exactly that, then hands over. Hotels and guest houses start from a setup built for the sector, with the handover rules already in place.

Lead capture is the other half of it. A room enquiry arrives with the dates, the party, the room type and any access need already asked for, in the guest's own wording. Whoever holds the diary can reply with what is actually free. The guest carries on with your team on WhatsApp, and an email alert reaches the person you put in charge of that kind of enquiry.

• Availability stays with the diary. Your booking calendar and channel manager sit outside the assistant's reach, so only your team can say whether a room is free. It gathers dates, party size and room type, and whoever runs reservations replies with what is actually available.
• Rates come from your published pages. Where a price depends on the season, the length of stay or a rate plan, the enquiry goes to whoever sets your prices, instead of a guess nobody has agreed to honour.
• Upgrades and room moves stay at the desk. Only your team knows what has been cleaned, turned around and left free this morning, so an upgrade request reaches them with the guest's wording on it.
• Trays and tables stay with the people carrying them. An order puts work on the kitchen or on a member of staff. The assistant passes on the request with whatever service times your pages publish, and your team places it.
• Accessibility answers stop at your access statement. It repeats what that statement publishes, and any question about one particular room reaches your duty manager, because a wrong answer is discovered by a guest standing at the door with a suitcase.
• Allergens reach the kitchen. A breakfast allergy question gets whatever your own page publishes and goes straight through to the kitchen, because only the people handling the morning's ingredients can answer it.
• Your telephone is left exactly as it is. Worth repeating, because the word concierge suggests someone picking up a phone: this answers in writing, on your site. The AI phone agent is on a waitlist.

The four options are priced in four different ways, so they are hard to compare on one spreadsheet. An in-room device is priced per room whether anyone uses it or not, and someone has to keep its answers up to date. A guest app is either a build or a licence, and you still have to get guests to install it. Phone software usually bills per call or per minute, so the invoice rises in a busy season; ask what the monthly minimum is, before a single call has landed.

Website chat is a flat monthly price, because it is software rather than staff hours. Adoomi has four plans: Free at £0 with 50 message credits, then £8, £20 and £75 with 200, 500 and 4,000. One credit is spent per AI answer, and all four plans sit beside each other on the pricing page. Setting one up takes roughly ten minutes: hand it the pages guests read before they book, work through the answers it drafts, then add one line to your website.

On data, since it always comes up: guest messages are stored inside the EU. A guest can have theirs exported or erased under GDPR, logs record identifiers instead of anything typed, and the chat window uses no tracking cookies. Compliance is a separate matter: none of that makes a property compliant on its own. Your own policies, registrations and processes do that.

Which one fits depends on where you are losing guests. For two of the three situations below, the honest answer is a different product.

1. They are already in the building. The requests going unanswered come from guests who have checked in — the extra towels, the late tray, the spa hours. That is an in-room or in-app problem, and a website assistant arrives too late to help with it.
2. They are still choosing you. Guests arrive from search, read three properties in three tabs and make their minds up before speaking to anybody. Answer them on your own site: it is the cheapest of the four to try, and it reaches them earliest.
3. They ring. A property whose enquiries mostly arrive as calls wants phone software or a person, and the website side can wait. Put the same question to any supplier: what does yours say to something the hotel has yet to publish?

Plenty of properties end up running two of these at once, because each catches a guest the other misses. One catches the guest who rang; the other catches the guest who read your rooms page late on a Sunday and closed the tab. When you compare suppliers, work out the cost per enquiry that reaches a person and is worth acting on. Counting how many enquiries were handled makes every supplier look good and tells you nothing.