Your restaurant answers bookings while you are on the floor

What it does in a restaurant

A restaurant loses bookings where nobody is looking: on the phone that nobody checks during service. At 13:12 on a Thursday, with every table taken, a message comes in asking ‘have you got a table for 4 on Saturday?’. It gets answered at five, by which time the table has been booked somewhere else.

Conserjía answers that WhatsApp in under a minute, at any hour, with the real availability in your bookings diary, and closes the booking in the same conversation:

• New bookings. Day, time, number of guests, inside or terrace, a name for the table. If there’s nothing at that time, it offers the nearest one.
• Changes and cancellations. ‘There’ll be six of us now’ or ‘we can’t make it’ sort themselves out, and the table goes straight back into the diary.
• Menu, opening hours and allergens. Using the menu and the allergen information you give it. What it doesn’t know, it says it doesn’t know, and passes to a person.
• Deposits for groups and busy dates. Above the number of guests you choose, the booking is confirmed with a payment in the chat, by card (or Bizum in Spain). It’s the cleanest way to put an end to tables of ten that never turn up.
• Same-day reminder. A message at midday with the booking and the option to cancel. Whoever was going to be a no-show lets you know; everyone else turns up.

It reads messages the way people actually write them: ‘table for 4 sat around half 9’, ‘can we bring the dog?’, ‘is the terrace covered?’. It books the first straight away, and answers the other two only if you’ve told it the answer. If you haven’t, it says so and a person picks it up.

What it doesn’t do

• It doesn’t invent dishes, prices or ingredients. It answers only with the information you’ve given it. If an allergen question isn’t covered, it says so and offers a person.
• It doesn’t decide on large groups, set menus or celebrations. It passes them to whoever you choose, with the whole conversation.
• It doesn’t offer tables you haven’t got. Only what your bookings diary shows as free, and nothing squeezed in.
• It doesn’t replace front of house. Any customer can type ‘person’ and talk to you.

A service with Conserjía

You open for lunch with the diary up to date. The bookings that came in overnight are there, each with the number of guests, where they’re sitting and any note for the kitchen: a coeliac, a high chair, a birthday. The group of twelve for Friday isn’t booked yet. It’s waiting for you as an alert, with the whole conversation, because a group that size is your call.

During service, front of house looks after the people in the room. The WhatsApp looks after itself, with your rules (which tables, which times, how much deposit) and your way of talking. A cancellation for tonight that comes in at 13:30 is back in the diary straight away, and the table goes to the next person who asks about tonight. What the assistant can’t sort out doesn’t sit there waiting: it reaches a person with the conversation in front of them, so no message goes unanswered.

At midday the reminders go out for tonight’s bookings, and the replies (‘yes’, ‘can we make it 21:30?’, ‘sorry, we can’t come’) update the diary on their own. When you close, you have a sheet with what happened: how many conversations, how many bookings, how many deposits taken and which ones went to a person, and why. Once a month we go through it with you, with figures, to adjust whatever needs it: a table that no longer exists, a menu that changed, a question it couldn’t answer.

The assistant talks like your restaurant, with your names for the rooms, your menus and your way of treating people. It introduces itself as an AI assistant in its first message, as required under EU law (AI Act, art. 50), and always offers to put the customer through to someone on your team. Conversations are hosted in the European Union (the language model is a processor in the United States under standard contractual clauses, as the privacy policy explains, in Spanish), and the WhatsApp account is yours, in your restaurant’s name.

Who it’s for

For restaurants that take bookings on WhatsApp (or would like to) and have nobody watching the phone during service: neighbourhood restaurants, cafés that take lunch bookings, places that fill up with big groups at the weekend, pubs where Sunday lunch is fully booked by Wednesday, venues with a terrace that’s full all summer. It works the same with one dining room as with three, because what matters is your diary.

If a lot of your bookings still come in by phone, the same assistant can answer calls too and book into the same diary. We explain how in the voice assistant, along with why we don’t recommend it below ten or fifteen calls a day.

If you get three messages a day, a well-written away message is all you need. If it’s thirty and half of them arrive in the middle of service, book a demo. It’s a 30-minute video call, we reply in under 24 working hours and set-up takes three weeks. Bring three real conversations from your WhatsApp and we’ll run them against your own diary.