Overview

Hotel Bergidyll is a mountain hotel in Andermatt, Switzerland, offering guests a self-check-in experience in a picturesque alpine setting.

The hotel is managed remotely by SUM Hospitality, a hospitality management company overseeing multiple properties across Switzerland. Their model allows one staff member to manage reservations, revenue, and guest communications for several hotels at once, supporting ambitious growth plans while creating pressure to keep operations lean and scalable.

The challenge

Email is one of SUM Hospitality’s most important sales channels, accounting for a significant share of bookings. Yet staff had to handle inquiries manually, moving between inboxes and their PMS Mews. This meant repetitive data entry into PMS and manually writing every email response, making the process slow and time-consuming. With one person managing several hotel inboxes, it was difficult to reply quickly, even though speed often determined whether a booking was secured.

Generic tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot only provided marginal benefits as they lacked hospitality-specific knowledge and PMS integration. To scale, SUM Hospitality needed a way to centrally automate email workflows while still reflecting each hotel’s unique details. This would allow one staff member to handle more properties effectively as the portfolio grew.

The solution

SUM Hospitality introduced Lobby at Hotel Bergidyll to automate common reservation emails, from sending quotes to providing customized booking links and creating bookings.

Trained on the hotel’s brand voice and operational details, and connected directly with Mews Open APIs, Lobby can extract reservation details from emails and create bookings in Mews. This reduced manual work and eliminated constant context switching between inbox and PMS.

Staff stayed in control by reviewing AI workflows and responses before they were completed or sent, and as Lobby continues to learn from their edits, the number of adjustments required has steadily decreased.

The results

Since adopting Lobby, Hotel Bergidyll has seen clear improvements:

• 1 hour saved per staff member per day through reduced manual data entry, writing, and system switching.

• Higher guest satisfaction from consistently quick, personalized replies even during peak demand.

• Greater accuracy in reservations with fewer mistakes from manual handling.

This frees the team to focus more on strategic sales and less on repetitive administrative tasks, directly supporting SUM Hospitality’s goal of scaling operations without proportional hiring.

Looking ahead

Lobby’s success at Hotel Bergidyll has encouraged SUM Hospitality to expand it to the other hotels they manage, making it a key part of their broader strategy to automate operations as their portfolio grows.

With continuous improvement reducing the need for manual intervention, they plan to fully automate simpler email inquiries while ensuring staff only step in for the most critical cases.

This approach will further cut manual effort and enable faster responses to booking requests. In addition, the collaboration has uncovered additional types of email inquiries that can be automated, ensuring that the time savings will continue to increase over time.