A voice agent that handles 92% of after-hours booking calls across 11 venues.

Republic Hospitality runs about twelve Queenstown bars and restaurants, a resort market where demand is fierce, seasonal and unforgiving - a table not booked tonight is simply gone, and a regular who can't get through once will try the venue next door. A large share of booking calls land after the office closes or while floor staff are already slammed during service, exactly the moments when nobody can pick up. Every missed and rung-out call meant lost covers and a frustrated caller, including Social Club regulars trying to lock in their usual table, and across a busy weekend those small losses added up to real revenue walking out the door.

The structural problem was that the group had no single after-hours line that could actually do anything. Voicemail and a generic answering service could take a message, but neither could see whether a table was free at 7.30 on Saturday or confirm a booking on the spot, so callers were left waiting for a callback that often came too late. With venues spread across the group and each carrying its own diary, Republic needed something that could check live availability venue by venue and close the booking in the moment - not just record that someone had called. They wanted the after-hours experience to feel like talking to a competent host, not a machine taking a note.

"Our team used to have to choose between looking after the room and answering the phone, and in Queenstown that choice cost us covers every single weekend. Now the after-hours line checks the diary and confirms the booking itself, right down to the SMS, and we wake up to a full book instead of a list of missed calls. It genuinely sounds like one of our hosts, which is the part our regulars noticed first."