Software for hospitality groups, covers, staff and stock.

A percentage point of labour cost or a handful of recovered covers a week is the difference between a good and a bad quarter in hospitality. That is unusual, and it means automation with a modest effect still pays back quickly.

It also means the sector is unusually badly served, because generic software is priced for businesses with fatter margins.

Turnover in hospitality is structural rather than a failure, which means recruitment is a permanent process rather than an occasional project. Treating it as an always on pipeline rather than a series of emergencies is the single biggest operational change available.

One booking calendar fed by every channel, with confirmations and reminders, sits at the lower end of the £8,000 to £30,000 range, or inside web development at £4,000 to £16,000 when it forms part of a new site. Rota and staffing work is usually a separate phase.

For a single site independent, the site with booking is often the whole answer. For a group, the consolidated view across sites is where the money is.

Covers lost to no-shows and late cancellations, and how long a released table or slot stays unsold. Then minutes per day spent reconciling bookings between channels, which is the administrative cost that hides in plain sight.

On staffing, measure hours per week spent building and amending the rota, including the messages required to confirm a change. The confirmation loop is usually larger than the rota itself.

A 30-minute call to hear how the operation runs today, then a paid discovery step: interviews with the people doing the work, a look at the systems and data you already hold, and a ranked list of what would pay back, each with a price, a timeline and the monthly running cost once live. In most restaurant, hotel or venue engagements the first thing built is bookings, enquiries and no-show reduction handled without the phone ringing out at service, because it is measurable inside a month and it funds the rest.

The build runs in weekly demos against your real inputs, including the messy ones. Integration with the systems you already run comes before anything clever, because that is where most of the value and most of the risk sits. Go-live is followed by handover: the code, the provider accounts and the credentials in your name, a runbook, documentation and a recorded walkthrough, plus a session for the people who will use it daily. Every price is fixed in writing before work starts, with a list of what is not included.

Food hygiene under the Food Standards Agency, allergen information under the labelling rules, licensing conditions, and employment rules for a workforce that is often young and part-time all produce checks and records. Software can keep the allergen matrix current from the recipe data, log the temperature checks, schedule the rota within the rules and chase the certificates, and it can answer the questions guests ask most, including the allergen ones, from the same source of truth. Guest data and card details carry the usual UK GDPR and payment-security duties, and deposit and cancellation terms have to be fair under consumer law.

Our published prices apply to every sector: an AI adoption audit at £2,500 to £6,000 fixed, credited in full against any build; a first AI implementation at £4,000 to £15,000; a custom AI system at £8,000 to £25,000; applications at £8,000 to £30,000 per phase; websites at £4,000 to £16,000; training from £1,200. For a venue that usually means an AI that answers the phone and messages for bookings and enquiries as the first implementation, then rota, stock and allergen tooling as a custom system, with the booking platform you already use kept as the record.

The running cost is stated before go-live, per feature, and it scales with volume rather than headcount. From operating our own AI products, the model is rarely the expensive part; the channels around it, telephony and messaging, usually are, and a well-designed workflow sends most of its work to the small, cheap models. Every system we build reports cost per feature from day one and has spending ceilings that were tested by watching them fire.

A restaurant’s phone rings during service, which is exactly when nobody can answer it. Every unanswered call is a booking taken elsewhere. An AI that answers, takes the booking into your system, confirms the deposit and answers the questions about parking, dogs and allergens is the single automation that pays back fastest in hospitality. Reminders with a real reply channel cut the no-shows; a waiting list that fills a cancelled table automatically recovers the rest. Our receptionist page sets out how it works and what it hands to a person.