Hotel Answering Service and Virtual Receptionist
Never miss a booking enquiry again.
Frontly answers reservation and guest calls 24/7 and captures every request.
The short answer
What is Frontly's hotel answering service?
Frontly is an AI hotel answering service and virtual receptionist for Australian hotels and hospitality venues. It answers every reservation and guest call 24/7, captures booking enquiries, and handles guest requests, landing every enquiry in your Frontly dashboard for your team to action. Live in about an hour, flat monthly rate, no commitment beyond the plan you pick.
THE PROBLEM
Unanswered Calls Are Unfilled Rooms
21x
better odds of qualifying an enquiry when you respond within 5 minutes rather than 30. A traveller comparing properties books with whoever answers.
Source: MIT / InsideSales Lead Response Study, 2007
After hours.
Travellers research and book outside business hours. Unanswered calls after 5pm often mean a booking at your competitor.
Instant
Frontly answers the moment the call comes in. Every reservation enquiry handled before the caller moves on.
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF
Your AI Agent Is Ready to Talk
Call our AI agent right now. It'll handle a hotel reservation enquiry, just like it would for your property. No signup required.
Test Call
Talk to the AI agent right now from your browser. Hear exactly how Frontly will sound for your business.
HOW IT WORKS
Live in About an Hour. Across All Your Properties.
Connect Your Phone
Forward your existing hotel line or get dedicated AI numbers per property. No hardware changes needed.
We Help Set Up Your First Workflow
Our team helps set up your first workflow around your property types, room categories, rate structures, and how you handle different guest scenarios.
Go Live
Frontly answers every call, handles reservation enquiries, manages guest requests, and routes calls to the right team, across all properties from one dashboard.
WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES
Every Guest Call, Handled
Frontly answers reservation and guest calls 24/7 across every property, so your front desk stays focused on the guests in front of them. Every enquiry captured in your Frontly dashboard, and your existing software connected during onboarding.
Reservation enquiries
Answers questions on availability, room types, and rates, captures the guest's dates and details, and logs the booking enquiry in your Frontly dashboard.
Booking changes and cancellations
Handles date changes, amendments, and cancellations 24/7, captures the request, and frees the room so your team can resell it.
Guest requests
Takes in-stay requests like room service, housekeeping, and maintenance, and routes each one to the right department without tying up the front desk.
Group and event enquiries
Captures the details on group bookings, functions, and events, then routes the enquiry to your sales or reservations team to follow up.
After-hours front desk
Covers reception overnight, on weekends, and on public holidays, handling late check-ins and guest calls while your team sleeps.
Visual Workflow Builder
Script Your Front Desk for the Hours It Is Unstaffed
Your First Workflow, Built With You
Our team maps your room types, your rates, your check-in rules and your after-hours policy, and sets up your first workflow with you: what the AI can confirm and what it must not.
Complete the Booking, Not a Message
The flow is built to finish a reservation during the call, because a message taken at 11pm is a booking the guest makes on an OTA instead.
Guest, Prospect or Supplier
The script separates a current guest with a problem from someone enquiring about availability and from a supplier calling the wrong number.
Verify Before Releasing Anything
Add an SMS check against the number on the booking before the AI gives out an access code or changes a reservation.
Change It Yourself
Adjust rates commentary, house rules, or the after-hours window as the season changes, without waiting on us.
Cross-Call Memory
Your AI Remembers Returning Guests
- Repeat guests recognised on the next call
- Previous stays and stated preferences recalled automatically
- No returning guest re-explaining what they asked last time
- Full call history against the guest before your team picks up
Frontly Dashboard
Every Reservation and Request in One Place
Bookings and Requests Together
Reservations, amendments and guest requests land in your Frontly dashboard with the details captured, ready for the front desk in the morning.
Full Transcript on Every Call
Read exactly what the guest asked for, so a rate or availability dispute is settled from the record rather than memory.
Duty Manager Alerts
Configure an SMS or call the moment something genuinely needs a person on site, day or night.
Cross-call History at a Glance
Every previous call from that guest, across every stay, in one place.
Live Status Across Properties
For a group, see what is coming in across every property from a single screen.
Outbound Campaign Manager
Fill the Rooms the Calendar Says Are Empty
Pre-Arrival and Confirmation Calls
Confirm arrival times and capture requests before the guest turns up, so the front desk is not solving it at check-in.
Win Back Past Guests
Call previous direct bookers when you have availability to fill, rather than discounting through a channel and paying commission on it.
Same Builder, No New Tool
Script the campaign with the same drag-and-drop builder you used for inbound reservations.
See What Landed
Track which calls produced a direct booking, so you know which lists are worth running again.
INTEGRATIONS
Works with the software hospitality already runs on
Connect your AI receptionist to the software your team already uses, so Frontly can check availability, manage bookings and capture caller details as part of your reception workflow.
Hotels and accommodation
Guesty
Hostaway
Cloudbeds
RMS Cloud
Newbook
Mews
SiteMinder
GuestPoint
Tours and activities
Team messaging
CRM, calendars and productivity
Integrations support Frontly's reception and caller follow-up workflows. Available actions depend on the connected software and your setup.
Integration allowances vary by plan. See Pricing for what's included.
Not on the list, or need a specific workflow? Tell us what you use and what you'd like Frontly to handle. We'll check what's possible.
WHAT USUALLY DECIDES IT
The three questions that come up every time
A real person, whenever the caller wants one
Every workflow can hand the call to your duty manager. The transfer carries a spoken briefing, so your team picks up already knowing who is calling and why. The caller never has to explain themselves twice, which is usually the moment a good call turns into a complaint.
More than one language, on the same number
Frontly answers guests in more than one language on the same reservations number. For international guests this is the difference between a completed direct booking and a call that ends in silence.
Flat monthly rate, and knowledge that costs nothing to grow
Your plan is a flat monthly rate covering a set number of call minutes, and there is no cap on how many questions the AI is allowed to answer. Adding another topic to its knowledge never adds a line to the bill, and every rate we do meter is published up front. See pricing for the current rates.
ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI
Answering service or AI receptionist for a hotel?
An answering service takes the guest's number and asks the property to ring back. An AI receptionist handles the reservation enquiry, the late arrival, or the request for a cot, on the call. For a property that is the difference between a direct booking and a guest who books on an OTA instead.
Where a staffed answering service still wins
A guest complaint mid-stay. Someone unhappy at 1am wants a person with authority to fix it, and no amount of good scripting substitutes for that. Frontly hands those to your duty manager, but a staffed service puts a human on the line first.
Where Frontly wins
Reservations, availability, parking, check-in times and amenity questions are the bulk of the phone and they arrive around the clock. Those complete on the call, in more than one language, without the front desk leaving the guest standing at the counter.
Most businesses end up running one or the other rather than both. If you are weighing it up properly, the full cost and capability breakdown is in Frontly against OfficeHQ.
THE BAR FOR HOSPITALITY
A reservation is an unambiguous money event, so the bar is completing one
Hospitality is the clearest test of whether voice AI can finish a transaction instead of taking a message. Either the caller ends the call with a room held, or the call was a deflection with extra steps.
Bigger organisation?
Hotel groups and multi-property operators
Enterprise builds voice experiences to measure for your group, such as voice ordering, connected to your own systems during the call. Own-cloud or on-premise deployment, SLA-backed uptime and a dedicated account manager.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Frontly can be configured to handle calls for multiple properties from a single dashboard, with per-property routing rules, greetings, and pricing information.
Straight into your property management system once it is connected, and always in your Frontly dashboard with the guest name, dates requested, room type, contact details and the full call transcript. Your reservations team sees every enquiry in one place, and email and SMS notifications can also push booking summaries straight to your reservations inbox.
Frontly can handle in-stay guest calls like room service requests, maintenance issues, and early check-out requests, routing each to the right department without tying up your front desk.
No. Frontly does not replace your PMS. Frontly is the AI reservation agent that answers calls and captures bookings into the Frontly dashboard. Your reservations team continues to use your existing PMS for guest management, room control, and check-in. Frontly handles the call answering and booking capture; your PMS handles the rest.
About an hour for a standard property. The workflows are templated by industry, so most of the setup is agreeing your room types, rates commentary, after-hours rules and who a transfer should reach. Multi-property groups and unusual requirements need scoping first, and we will tell you upfront if yours is one of them.
Frontly's core systems are Australian-hosted and the business is built and operated in Australia. To deliver real-time conversation, limited call content is processed by specialist speech and language providers, some located overseas, under no-retention terms. Our privacy page sets out the full data flow rather than reducing it to a slogan.
Frontly is a flat monthly rate with a monthly call-minute allowance, not a meter running from the first call. Plans are month to month, with outbound campaigns on the Pro plan, and the current rates are on our pricing page. Nothing is priced per conversation, so a full house or an event weekend is covered by the allowance.
Yes. One Frontly account can run separate greeting, room categories, rate information, and routing rules for each property. Consolidated reporting across your whole group. Per-property branding on every call.
Yes. Frontly warm-transfers a guest to reservations, the duty manager or whoever you approve, with a short spoken briefing so they never repeat their dates or room. Each transfer can try a preferred number and then a backup. Overnight, when nobody can pick up, Frontly takes the details and sends them by email or SMS for the morning team.
Frontly answers from the property information you load, such as check-in times, parking and rates commentary, and it will not invent a rate, an availability or a policy. Anything outside that becomes a message or a transfer to your team. The question shows up in your dashboard with the transcript, so you can add the answer for the next guest.
Yes. Each Frontly agent speaks the language you set, from Mandarin and Hindi to Spanish, French and Japanese, out of more than 40 languages, and on the Pro plan your front-desk agent can hand guests to a specialist in their language. Availability, check-in times and directions are handled without an interpreter. Australian guests hear a natural Australian voice you choose.
Completing the reservation is the bar it should be held to. A system worth having checks availability, holds the room, and sends the confirmation on the call, rather than answering a question and passing the caller to reception. Your first workflow is set up with you against your rate plans, your room types and your cancellation rules, so the booking it writes is one you can honour.
Reservation value and direct booking conversion, not calls answered. The commercial unit is a completed booking, particularly one captured after hours or through your own channel rather than an online travel agent. A small number of direct bookings a month usually covers the cost of the system, which makes the payback easy to check against your own numbers.
KEEP EXPLORING
Keep exploring Frontly for Hospitality
Go deeper on the capabilities, comparisons, and guides that matter most.
24/7 inbound answering
How Frontly answers every call, qualifies the caller, and books the job in your dashboard.
How inbound worksOutbound campaigns
Recalls, follow-ups, arrears, and lead reactivation dialled automatically at scale.
Run outboundAfter-hours answering
The front desk is unattended overnight at most properties. See how guest calls are handled after hours.
See after-hoursVirtual receptionist cost in 2026
What human and AI receptionists actually cost in Australia, and where each wins.
Read the guideReady to Capture Every Booking Enquiry?
Set up your AI front desk in about an hour. No commitment beyond the plan you pick. Flat monthly rate.