We stopped apologizing for the hours we keep. A guest who calls at night gets the answer they would get at noon, in the language they called in, and the night desk only takes the calls that need it.
Marguerite Ashby
Guest Experience Director
The problem
Fernhill runs its properties out of one central reservations desk, and that desk used to close at night. Everything arriving after it went to a voicemail box a duty manager cleared in the morning.
Room changes, late arrivals, rate questions and billing disputes all waited eight hours for an answer, and plenty of them did not wait at all. Guests booked somewhere else, or called a property directly and pulled a night porter off the floor to do the desk’s job.
The obvious answers had already been tried. An after-hours agency took messages but could not quote a rate plan. A phone tree routed calls to extensions nobody was sitting at.
What Canto did
Fernhill put a single agent on the reservations number and gave it three things to work from.
The rate and availability system, connected live, so the agent quotes what is on sale tonight rather than what a document said last quarter.
The property policy set, 87 documents, indexed continuously and cited in every answer it grounds.
A refund guardrail capped at the duty manager’s own limit, with anything above it escalated rather than approved.
Web chat went live in the second week and WhatsApp in the fourth. They all run on one memory, so a guest who starts on the phone and finishes on WhatsApp is one thread with the history behind it.
What still goes to a person
Anything above the refund cap, anything a guest asks a person for, and anything the knowledge cannot ground in a source. Sentiment drops twice and the thread is on a human’s screen with the summary already written.
What changed
The night desk did not go away. It went from clearing a voicemail box in the morning to taking the handful of calls a night that genuinely need a person, and the support bill came in under the year before it.
The billing threads are the clearest case. A guest at Fernhill Riverside was charged for 14 rooms against a booking of 12. The agent found the invoice, matched it to the booking record, credited $384.00 back to the card on file and reissued it. The thread closed with no handoff and no policy exception.
Next
The desk is taking the agent to the spa and restaurant lines next, where the questions are different and the hours are the same. The number guests call has not changed, and it is not going to.
