Akia launches AI Voice, an AI receptionist that answers calls and books rooms.
The same AI agent that runs guest messaging now picks up the phone, books rooms, and takes payment mid-call for hotels and vacation rentals.
Akia today launched AI Voice, an AI receptionist for hotels and vacation rentals that answers the phone line in real conversation and resolves most calls without the front desk. It is the same AI agent that already handles guest messaging, now able to speak.
When a guest calls, Akia picks up on the first ring. There is no phone tree and no hold music. She matches the caller's number to their reservation in the property's PMS and knows the guest's name and their stay before she says hello. From there she answers the question or handles the booking for the guest.
Akia can also take payment during the call. She texts a secure, PCI-compliant link and stays on the line until it clears, so a card number is never spoken aloud or saved to any transcript. On the same call, she can offer an early check-in or a room upgrade. Mid-call payment and on-call upselling are capabilities most voice tools in hospitality don't offer, and they turn an inbound call into revenue rather than a task for later.
For the calls that genuinely need a person, Akia hands them off cleanly. You tell her who handles what, and she passes each caller to the right team member with a short summary of what they need. The front desk only picks up the calls that were meant for them.
"The industry has suffered through twenty years of IVRs only to have the front desk still act as the router," said Evan Chen, CEO of Akia. "Guests press zero and the calls land at the desk anyway. Akia picks up, answers questions, and pushes bookings back into the PMS."
AI Voice runs on the same framework as the rest of Akia's agents, so a property's existing policies and reservation data carry straight over to the phone with no separate setup. Every call logs itself against the guest's reservation, and Akia's built-in dialer lets staff call any guest straight from their thread.
AI Voice is available to Akia customers now. Each property gets a sandbox number to test draft instructions on real calls before publishing them to its production line.
