The guest pays on their own phone.
No card number read aloud to a machine, nothing sensitive on a recording. The link arrives by WhatsApp or SMS while the room is still held — and the confirmation follows the moment the payment clears.
Product
It doesn't take messages. It completes bookings.
Most systems that answer a hotel phone out of hours can take a name and a number. The difference here is what happens next: AllHourDesk holds real inventory, collects payment, and writes a confirmed reservation into your system of record — or gives the room back if payment never arrives.
01
Five operations, on every call
Everything the agent can do reduces to these. Each one runs against your live back-end, not a copy of it.
SEARCHQueries live availability for the caller's dates and party size.
LISTReads back real room types, rates and cancellation terms — never an invented price.
PROVISIONPlaces a temporary hold on the chosen room so it can't be sold twice while the guest pays.
BOOKConfirms the reservation once payment clears, and returns the confirmation code.
CANCELCancels an existing booking after verifying the caller, and triggers the refund.
02
The hard part: hold → pay → confirm
A phone call and a payment happen on two different clocks. The guest is on the line; the card is charged a few minutes later, on their phone, after they've hung up. Between those two moments the room has to be genuinely unavailable to everyone else — and if the payment never lands, it has to go back on sale without anyone touching it.
01
Quote
The agent reads back live options. Nothing is reserved yet.
02
Hold
The guest picks one and the room is held in your back-end, with a deadline attached.
03
Pay
A secure payment link goes to the guest's phone by WhatsApp or SMS while they're still on the call. Card details are never spoken aloud.
04
Confirm
Payment clears, the reservation is confirmed in your system, and the guest gets the confirmation code on the same thread.
05
Or release
No payment by the deadline and the hold is released automatically — the room goes back on sale without a human noticing it was ever gone.
Why this matters
The failure everyone worries about is the one where money is taken and the room isn't secured. That path is handled explicitly: the booking is either completed, refunded, or escalated to your team — never silently dropped.
After the call
03
Your back-end, whatever it is
Hotels run wildly different systems — modern REST APIs, channel managers, and legacy XML connectors that disagree about basic things like whether a "hold" exists at all. All of it sits behind one internal interface, so adding a property doesn't mean rebuilding the product.
Modern PMS
Apaleo is live and running real bookings today. Mews and other open-API systems follow the same integration path.
Channel managers
For properties pooling inventory across OTAs and direct channels.
Legacy connectors
OTA-XML style connectors, where capabilities vary. Where a system has no native hold, the platform simulates one and manages the risk explicitly rather than pretending it isn't there.
04
Keep the number your guests already have
Your published number is on signage, on Google, on every past guest's phone. It doesn't change. Three ways to route it, in order of how much commitment they ask for.
FORWARDThe default, and where every pilot starts. Your line rings first; only unanswered calls fall through to AllHourDesk. Minutes to set up, and switching it off restores exactly what you had before.
PORTThe number moves to us permanently, once you're past evaluating. A real telecom transfer — typically 5–15 business days, and timelines vary by country.
SIPFor properties with a modern SIP-capable PBX that would rather keep routing logic in-house. Lower cost at volume, more setup.
Deliberate posture
Forward-on-no-answer means the AI is overflow and after-hours cover, not a replacement for your front desk. Your team keeps every call it wants.
05
Language and the feel of the call
Multilingual
European languages plus Arabic, detected from how the caller speaks rather than chosen from a menu.
Built for interruption
Callers talk over the agent, change their minds, and trail off. Turn-taking is tuned so a "yeah" or "mm-hmm" doesn't derail the sentence.
Grounded answers
Rates and room types come from tool calls against your inventory. If a lookup fails, the agent says there's a technical problem — it does not guess a price.
Logged for the morning
Every call leaves a transcript and a booking audit trail your team can read at handover.
06
Compliance as a design input
Four regimes apply at once to a recorded, AI-answered, card-taking phone call in Europe and the Gulf. They shaped the architecture rather than being audited onto it afterwards.
EU AI Act
The agent discloses that it's an AI at the start of every call, in the caller's language.
GDPR & consent
Recording, consent capture and retention are configurable per tenant and per country, because EU consent law is not uniform.
PCI-DSS
Payment happens on a hosted payment page. Card data never enters the call, our systems, or yours.
Data residency
EU-hosted by default, with region partitioning for Gulf properties under Saudi PDPL.