A voice agent that handles 92% of after-hours booking calls across 11 venues.

Republic Hospitality runs about twelve Queenstown bars and restaurants, a resort market where demand is fierce, seasonal and unforgiving — a table not booked tonight is simply gone, and a regular who cannot get through once will try the venue next door. A large share of booking calls land after the office closes or while floor staff are already slammed during service, exactly the moments when nobody can pick up. Every missed and rung-out call meant lost covers and a frustrated caller, including Social Club regulars trying to lock in their usual table, and across a busy weekend those small losses added up to real revenue walking out the door.

The structural problem was that the group had no single after-hours line that could actually do anything. Voicemail and a generic answering service could take a message, but neither could see whether a table was free at 7.30 on Saturday or confirm a booking on the spot, so callers were left waiting for a callback that often came too late. With venues spread across the group and each carrying its own diary, a one-size message bank was never going to cut it.

So we set up Republic’s own operating system for front-of-house after hours — a Company OS that spans every venue’s booking line and knows how Republic hosts, rather than a generic call bot bolted on top. It runs on the group’s own systems and its own tone of voice: built around each venue’s live diary and the way Republic’s teams actually look after guests, so the after-hours experience feels like part of the business, not an outsourced gap.

Inside that OS, a voice agent answers on the first ring on every venue’s line, no matter the hour. It is connected live to the ResDiary reservation system, so it checks real table availability venue by venue instead of promising a callback, and it can create, modify and cancel bookings end to end — then fire an SMS confirmation so the guest has the details in hand before they hang up. Genuinely complex or large-group enquiries are routed to a callback queue for staff, so the agent handles the routine and people handle the high-touch, and the voice and pacing are tuned to sound like a warm Queenstown host.

The shift was immediate. Most after-hours calls are now resolved end to end with no staff involvement, guests booked and confirmed before they put the phone down, and covers that used to slip away as missed calls are captured overnight — dead hours turned into filled tables. Floor teams stopped breaking service to chase the phone during peak, regulars stopped hitting voicemail and dead ends, and the after-hours line went from a gap in the operation to one of its quiet assets — a system that is unmistakably Republic’s own.