Only 44% of Multi-Question Hotel Inquiries Get a Complete Answer

Only 44 percent of multi-question guest inquiries receive a complete answer, according to an analysis of hotel reservation workflows from Lobby, a guest-communication technology company. The same analysis found that 42 percent of refused requests end without any alternative booking being proposed, and that nearly 12 percent of follow-up emails are guests re-asking questions they already submitted.

Those three figures point to the same failure: the reply goes out, the response-time clock stops, and the guest still does not have what they need to book. Lobby co-founder and CEO Romy Abbrederis argues that response time is not the best performance metric. What matters more is whether the inquiry is completely resolved.

For a direct-booking strategy, this is a revenue-recovery problem hiding inside a service metric. A guest who asks several questions in one email and gets a partial answer has to write again. A guest whose request is refused and hears no alternative has been given no reason to stay in the property’s own booking flow. Each of those leaks is an inquiry the property already paid to attract and then did not close.

Abbrederis advises hotels to look at reservation-journey quality beyond standard KPIs, since competitive advantage will increasingly depend on understanding missed opportunities rather than simply answering faster. That is a practical audit any team can run this week: pull twenty recent multi-question inquiries and check whether each question was answered, then pull twenty declined requests and check whether an alternative was offered.

Lobby will present the findings at the Web in Travel conference in Singapore, September 30 to October 2. The data frames a clear use case for AI-assisted guest messaging: measure completeness of the answer and the alternative offered, not the speed of the first reply.