Short on staff? Stop using them as an answering machine

Two guests at once

Picture Sara. She's the front desk at Locanda del Borgo, a small inn tucked into a hill town. Right now she's checking in a family of four — kids restless, parents tired from the drive. This is the good part of the job, the reason you hired her. Then her phone lights up on the counter. WhatsApp. Three messages in the same minute: what time is breakfast, what's the wi-fi password, can we have a late check-out tomorrow. None of them is urgent. All of them want an answer now. So Sara has to choose who waits — the family in front of her, or the phone. Either way, someone walks away feeling ignored. And the trap is that this isn't a one-off: it repeats at every busy moment of the day — at check-in, at breakfast, during the afternoon rush — and each time, Sara faces the same impossible choice.

The job you can't fill

You already know how hard the front desk is to staff. In a survey by the American Hotel & Lodging Association, hotel owners named housekeeping the hardest role to cover, at 38%, with the front desk right behind at 26%. It's a U.S. survey, but the pattern travels: the people who make a stay feel human are exactly the ones you can't find enough of. Which makes the math brutal. Every hour Sara spends typing the wi-fi password for the fortieth time is an hour not spent on the welcome you can't automate and can't outsource. You didn't hire her to be a switchboard. You hired her to make people feel at home — and then handed her a phone that never stops. So the shortage isn't only about who you can hire; it's about how you spend the few people you did manage to hire. Burn them on a switchboard and even a full roster feels understaffed.

Let the repeats go to the agent

Here's the shift. The questions that repeat — breakfast hours, wi-fi, parking, late check-out — are the ones an AI agent answers best, precisely because the answer never changes. Rivinci's agent works across your channels: the same agent that lives on your website also picks up on WhatsApp, where your guests already are. When those three messages land, the agent replies in seconds, in the guest's own language, from what you taught it. Sara's phone stays quiet. She finishes the check-in, walks the family up to their room, and points them to the good trattoria down the street. The repetitive stuff got handled. The human stuff got her full attention. Nothing sat waiting on a dark screen, and nobody at the desk had to look up from a real guest just to type a canned reply for the umpteenth time today.

Locanda del Borgo · Agent

While the agent answers on WhatsApp, Sara welcomes the family at the desk.

Giving the job back

This isn't about replacing Sara. An agent can't carry a suitcase up the stairs or read a tired traveler's face and warm up the welcome to match it. What it can do is take the forty identical questions off her plate, so she can do the part only she can do. You're short on staff — so stop spending the staff you have on work a machine can handle. Give them back the hours, and the job you actually hired them for. Think of it as reclaiming the hours you're already paying for and pointing them back at the guest standing in front of you. Sara and Locanda del Borgo are made up. The stack of repeat messages waiting at your front desk isn't.