The questions guests ask between booking and arriving

This traffic is almost entirely answerable

Unlike a sales enquiry, a pre-arrival question rarely needs judgement. Check-in and check-out times, early arrival and late departure policy, parking and its cost, pets, cots and extra beds, breakfast hours, pool and spa opening, airport distance and transfer options, luggage storage, accessibility - these are facts a hotel already knows and has usually already published somewhere the guest did not look.

It arrives at the worst possible hour

Pre-arrival questions cluster in the evening before travel and during travel itself, which is to say in the hours when reception is thinnest and a guest is least able to wait. A question asked from an airport at eleven at night about a two-in-the-morning arrival is urgent in a way that a question about next month's booking is not, and it reaches whoever is on the desk alongside everything else they are doing.

Answering it in the guest's own language is not a nicety

A guest arriving from another country is asking in their second or third language, often about something that matters - a transfer, a medical requirement, a child. Making them negotiate a language barrier at an airport at midnight is where a good stay starts badly. This is the single part of hotel enquiry handling where automatic language detection earns its place outright.

What must still reach a person

Anything that commits the hotel to something: a specific room, an upgrade, a guaranteed early check-in, a rate change, a refund. The honest behaviour is to state the published policy, record the request against the booking, and say when somebody will confirm. A guest told at midnight that early check-in is fine, who then arrives to a room that is not ready, has been given a worse experience than one who was told the policy and asked to confirm on the day.