Focus on Hospitality Tackles Reservations With Aila

Aila Answers Hospitality's Lost Revenue Problem

Focus on Hospitality builds AI receptionist for hospitality's missed call problem, helping Welsh restaurant recover 60% service time and secure £7.4k in additional gross revenue with booking platform integrations

London, 7 September 2026: Focus on Hospitality by Focus Group - the UK' s leading IT services and support company - has launched Aila, an AI receptionist purpose developed for hotels, restaurants, venues and multi-site hospitality businesses to tackle lost revenue, operational pressures and poor customer experience. 

Answering calls 24-hours a day, seven days a week, Aila ensures service teams remain focused on the guest in front of them, handling frequently asked questions, processing reservations in the booking platform, and routing urgent calls to the right department.

Built and customised to hospitality operations, Aila enhances business capability during busy periods and captures calls that would otherwise be lost out of hours. Helping hospitality businesses plug the gap where cost efficiencies have been made, Aila enables them to recoup potential lost bookings and improve customer experience.

Early results from a three-month pilot with an independent Brazilian steakhouse, Viva Brazil (Cardiff), contributed approximately £7,400 in additional gross revenue, while recovering approximately 60% of the time previously spent managing front-of-house call handling. Integrating with the restaurant’s booking platform - Aila records and confirms bookings with customers, and captures information like allergies, special occasions, birthdays, as well as vegan and vegetarian options, transferring this information into the table management software for service teams to access. 

Alessandra Leoni, Head of Hospitality, Focus on Hospitality by Focus Group said: “Where businesses have had to take incredibly difficult decisions to cut costs - this has hampered performance in other ways. A phone ringing off the hook may sound great, but the pressure reality on service teams is huge, and when those calls cannot get answered that gives customers a bad experience. Aila manages this balance so teams don’t have to split their focus. By integrating with essential hospitality booking systems, our solutions solve a problem while improving workflows.”

Aila works with a business's existing phone system and can be set up in under 48 hours. It is available to independent hotels and groups, restaurants, venues and large multi-site hospitality businesses through Focus on Hospitality, Focus Group's hospitality division.

Daniel Denman, Operations Manager, Viva Brazil, Cardiff said "During peak service periods, balancing guest interaction with answering incoming calls became extremely challenging. Prioritising excellent customer service on the restaurant floor often meant calls could not be answered promptly. Our mystery diner reports highlighted the poor customer experience when the phone was not answered. With Aila we capture all calls the team were missing, and the integration with Table Fox provides the perfect solution. We now have a calmer running restaurant, delivering a higher level of service dealing with customers face-to-face.”

Focus on Hospitality is now exploring the next phase of development for Viva Brazil to also integrate in-call upselling, offering wine packages and booking extras rather than waiting until guests arrive, following the same logic booking platforms already apply to online booking flows.