Case study · Harbor Hotels Group
A 24/7 voice agent across 47 properties that handles reservations, upgrades, and guest requests at human-grade quality — for 31% less than the prior BPO.
Harbor's reservation calls were routed to a third-party BPO that staffed up during day hours and shed capacity overnight. Result: 38% of calls between 9pm and 6am went to voicemail, and conversion on those callbacks was 11% — a quarter of daytime numbers.
Harbor had spent $2.3M on the BPO contract the prior year. Their leadership wanted 24/7 coverage at quality parity with daytime, without doubling spend.
We deployed a Twilio-fronted voice agent backed by GPT-4o Realtime, with property-specific knowledge bases (room types, amenities, policies) and live integration with Harbor's PMS for availability + booking. Warm transfer to a human concierge for VIPs and exceptions.
The agent runs 24/7 across all 47 properties. Daytime, it handles overflow when humans are busy. Overnight, it handles 100% of inbound until the morning shift starts.
Our first prototype had an 1100ms median turn latency. Guests hung up. We rebuilt the orchestrator to start TTS streaming on the first sub-clause from the LLM, dropped median to 600ms, and the hang-up rate fell 84% overnight.
We also discovered that hotel guests interrupt agents constantly — to add a date, change a room type, ask about parking. Without barge-in tuned to the right VAD threshold, the agent talked over guests and felt robotic. Two weeks of acoustic tuning fixed it.
Six months in, the agent handles 78% of inbound calls without human assistance. First-call resolution sits at 72%, ahead of Harbor's daytime BPO benchmark of 64%. Guest satisfaction (post-call survey) averages 4.7/5.
Harbor cancelled the BPO contract in Q3 2025 and routed the savings into expansion at four new properties — all of which launched with the voice agent live on day one.
“Voice AI that our guests actually enjoy. We thought that was impossible until night four of the pilot.”
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