Foreword, from the founders
Hey, I’m Chanel, a co-founder of Sorino. Over the last few years our team has stood in a lot of busy bars on a Friday, and the same thing keeps happening. You do the hard part. You build the room, the atmosphere, the reason people want to be there. And then the booking goes to whoever happened to answer first.
For bars and food-led pubs, the first step of a booking is now a message. The DM about a table for twelve. The call asking if you take walk-ins. The late question about the function room. Whoever answers first wins the booking. When the floor is heaving and no one can get to the phone, that booking, and often a fee, goes somewhere else.
This report is about closing that gap: answering your own guests, on your own channels, so the booking stays with you. Not a trick, not a chatbot bolted on the front. Just your phone, your inbox and your messages, actually answered.
What this report covers
Every bar lives with the same tension: the apps and the platforms bring you reach, but every booking they bring can cost you a slice of an already thin margin. This report looks at one practical move: winning more of your bookings back onto your own channels, where they cost you nothing per booking.
This is the bars edition. There is a wider report covering hotels, restaurants and bars together.
Read the full hospitality report →Section one
Why every booking matters now
You do not need convincing that margins in a bar are tight, but it is worth saying plainly. When a booking slips to a third party, the fee it carries comes straight off a margin that was already thin. And it does not show up as a line on the accounts. A missed call is not logged. An unread message is not counted. So on a busy night a handful of missed calls looks like nothing at the time, and adds up to a real number by the end of the week.
The one thing every operator already knows.
When the margin is that thin, the cut a third party takes on a booking is not a rounding error. It is often the difference.
Section two
The message is now the booking
For bars and food-led venues, the first step of a booking is increasingly a message. The Friday enquiry about a table for twelve. The DM asking if you take walk-ins. The late question about the function room. Whoever answers first, wins the booking. If that is a third-party platform, because your own phone and inbox were busy, the booking, and often a fee, goes with it.
The point that stings: plenty of those are guests who already knew you and would have booked direct, if only someone had been free to answer.
Section three
Answer it before it goes down the road
The booking that gets lost usually goes like this. The phone never stops on a Friday, the floor is heaving, and no one can get to it. The DM is seen two days later, by which point the group has booked down the road.
The fix is making sure the direct channels are actually answered, every time:
- Calls and messages answered the moment they come in, around the clock, so the Friday rush and the midnight enquiry both get caught.
- The booking locked in while the guest is still deciding.
- The repeat questions, are you open, do you do food, can we bring a big group, is the garden dog friendly, answered instantly from your own information, so the team can stay on the floor.
Section four
What the AI actually does: four channels, one knowledge base
Sorino puts an AI agent on the channels that go unanswered, all reading from one knowledge base of your own information: your menu, your hours, your booking policy and the answers to those same questions. It works alongside your team, covering the hours and the moments they cannot pick up.
| Channel | What it does |
|---|---|
| Voice | Answers the phone in your venue’s voice, day and night, takes the booking, and hands complex calls to a person. |
| Reads the inbox by intent, replies fast to enquiries and confirmations, and captures the enquiry as a booking. | |
| Chat | Answers website and WhatsApp questions and books on the spot. |
| Social | Replies to Instagram and Facebook messages before they go cold. |
| Knowledge base | One source of truth every channel reads from, so every answer matches, including menu and allergens. |
The point of all of it is simple: catch the booking the moment it arrives, so it never has to default to a channel that charges you.
Section five
What we will not let AI do
Winning back a booking is not worth getting the basics wrong. So a few lines we hold:
- It answers from your knowledge base, not from guesswork. If it does not know, it says so and hands off.
- Menu and allergen questions are answered from a written, checked record, never guessed. If it is not certain, the guest is told a person will confirm.
- Anything sensitive, a complaint or a complex request, goes to a person.
- It works alongside your team, never instead of them.
- It is on the record. You can see what it said and what it booked.
Getting started
You do not have to take our word for any of this. The honest way to judge it is to hear it answer.
Build your venue’s agent, ask it the awkward questions a real guest would, and hear how it sounds before you commit to anything. If it can take the booking your phone would have missed, that is a booking that keeps its full margin, starting with the very next call.
A note on numbers
We only publish figures we can attribute to a primary source. Booking and delivery platform fees vary by platform and by deal, so we do not put a single headline number on them here. The argument in this report does not rest on a statistic, it rests on something every operator already knows: on a busy night, the booking goes to whoever answers first.