Teaching the concierge: approved answers in practice

Most owners who try an AI concierge for the first time ask the same question: what stops it making things up?

The short answer is that it can only say what you have told it. The concierge works from a list of approved facts about your property. If a guest asks something that isn't on that list, it doesn't guess. It says it will check and passes the message to a person.

That makes the list the whole job. Get it right and the concierge handles the steady drip of questions that arrive at nine at night while you're closing the bar. Leave it thin and the concierge will hand nearly everything to you, which is safe but not much help.

Here's how to fill it properly.

What gets seeded for you

When your site goes up, a first pass at the facts comes straight from the website itself. Check-in and check-out times, where you are, how many rooms and what type, cancellation terms, whether breakfast is included, pets, children, parking. The things you had to write down anyway to have a website at all.

That gets you a working concierge on day one. It will answer the basics correctly because the basics are on your pages and the pages are yours.

What it won't have is everything that lives in your head and your staff's heads. Nobody puts "yes, the hot water is solar and it's hottest in the afternoon" on a web page. But guests ask.

The questions guests actually ask

Sit with whoever answers the phone and the WhatsApp for a week and write down the repeats. Not the interesting questions — the boring ones that come up again and again.

In Belize they tend to cluster:

• Is there hot water? Is it hot all day?
• Can we leave our bags after check-out? We've got a late flight from Belize City.
• Do you take US dollars? What about cards — and at what rate?
• Is there air conditioning, or fans? Does the AC run all night?
• Is the road passable in the rainy season? Do we need four-wheel drive?
• How do we get to you from the water taxi / the bus / the airstrip?
• Is there Wi-Fi in the rooms or only in the common area?
• Can you do a vegetarian breakfast? Gluten free?
• Is there a safe? Somewhere to lock a laptop?
• What time does the generator come on if the power goes?

A guesthouse in San Ignacio will have a different list from a cabana place on Caye Caulker, and a lodge up the Mountain Pine Ridge road will have a very different one again. That's the point. The concierge is only as local as you make it.

If three guests have asked it, it belongs in the facts. If one guest asked it, write it down anyway and see if it comes back.

Ten facts to add this week

If you want a starting point, work through these. Half an hour with a notepad in the kitchen, the way our hero photograph suggests, will cover most of them.

1. Hot water — how it's heated, when it's hottest, what to do if it runs cool.
2. Luggage storage — yes or no, where, until what time, whether it's locked.
3. Payment — which currencies you take at the property, which cards, whether there's a surcharge, where the nearest ATM is.
4. Getting there — the last mile. The turn-off, the landmark, the name of the road as locals use it, not the name on the map.
5. Road and weather — what the access road is like in June to November, whether a regular car manages it, what you do when it doesn't.
6. Power and water — generator or grid, whether outages are common, what the property does during one.
7. Air conditioning and fans — which rooms have what, and any running hours.
8. Breakfast — what's served, what time, whether you cater for dietary needs with notice.
9. Early arrival and late departure — what you can usually do, what it costs if anything.
10. Tours and transfers — which operators you work with, roughly what a transfer from the airstrip or the junction involves, and who to contact.

Add them in plain sentences, the way you'd say them to a guest at the desk. The concierge will use your wording, so your wording should sound like your property.

Why unapproved answers never happen

There's a reason the concierge stays quiet when it doesn't know. A wrong answer about hot water is a mild annoyance. A wrong answer about whether you take US dollars, or whether the road is driveable in a saloon car in October, is a guest arriving upset — or not arriving at all.

So the rule is strict: approved facts only, and an honest handoff for everything else. You see the question, you answer it, and then you add it to the list so the next person gets an instant reply.

That matters more than it used to. Travellers report expecting a reply within about five minutes — 82% of them — and 40% expect one inside the hour. Hotel chat assistants are reported to handle over 52% of routine questions without a person stepping in. The half they can't handle is still yours, and it should be. But the half they can covers most of the midnight messages.

The same discipline runs through the rest of the system, by the way. Suggested prices wait for a person to approve them. Draft ads and social posts wait for a person to approve them. Nothing goes out with your name on it that you haven't seen. You can read more about how the concierge is set up on the AI concierge feature page.

Keeping it current

The facts list isn't a one-time job. The road changes. The breakfast changes. A new water taxi schedule comes in and the old directions stop making sense.

A good habit: once a month, whoever handles messages reviews the handoffs. Every question the concierge passed to a person is a gap in the list. Most will be one-offs. A few will be things you've now answered by hand eleven times.

Staff logins have page-level permissions, so you can let your front-desk person edit the facts without giving them access to your rates or your bookings. In a family operation that may not matter. In a twenty-room place in Placencia with three people on rotation, it does.

Setup for a new property is typically done within a couple of weeks, and the facts list is the part you'll keep adding to long after the site is live. There's no long-term contract, and the site, the domain and the data stay yours. If you want to talk through what your own list would look like, get in touch.