Co-founder, Bookline
Bookline helps Hospitality brands stay always-on for its customers
The hospitality industry thrives on exceptional customer experiences, yet it can be a significant challenge to deliver these experiences. Bookline partners with more than 1,300 hospitality sites, helping these businesses leave a lasting impression on their customers. As loyal patrons translate into repeat business, Bookline’s mission is to help its clients achieve sustained customer engagement.
Founded in Spain in 2019, Bookline recognized a critical opportunity to help hospitality businesses recover revenue lost to missed bookings. Its platform leverages conversational AI to automate reservation and customer service calls, effectively extending operational hours and improving responsiveness. Bookline’s voice intelligence platform acts as a virtual extension of the front desk, available 24/7 for restaurants, apartments, hotels, hostels, and more—allowing its customers to be consistently available for their guests.
The timing of Bookline’s launch was unique. As customers began implementing this practical and effective solution, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented unforeseen challenges. However, as the industry rebounded, these same customers quickly returned to Bookline’s platform, demonstrating the enduring value of customer loyalty.
From an AI company to an AI GTM company
When Bookline first launched, conversational AI was at the core of its expertise. It focused on empowering hospitality venues to:
- Manage booking demand around the clock across all unstructured communication channels, including voice, messaging, and OTT platforms.
- Replace routine, low-value interactions with conversational AI, freeing staff to focus on higher-impact tasks.
- Deliver on-brand customer experiences, incorporating features like custom background sound effects during calls to enhance ambiance.
This thoughtful integration of human touch and automation enabled its customers to provide precise responses coupled with the ideal call environment, elevating the overall guest experience.
Once the conversational AI market got more competitive, Bookline’s real strength differentiated it—the rock-solid technology and speed at which it helps customers onboard and get to market as quickly as possible. Beyond technology alone, Bookline embraces a philosophy of delivering comprehensive value.
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
You have to think about the value you’re providing to your customers. It’s not just technology, it’s what is done with the technology. If you want a hospitality company, or any company, to start using AI, you really need to invest yourself in understanding everything required to help them achieve their goals with AI. Make sure that you do everything possible to transition them from a less-automated flow to a fully automated flow with AI.
$2M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) later, Bookline’s approach is helping it grow beyond Spain and into markets like Latin America and Southern Europe.
The secret to faster GTM—effective automation
Bookline faced an interesting conundrum when onboarding customers. When hospitality businesses transition to conversational AI, preserving familiar customer-facing elements—such as existing phone numbers—is essential. Although this may appear straightforward, it often complicates the adoption journey, leaving many clients uncertain about how to proceed.
Understanding this, Bookline goes above and beyond to facilitate a smooth onboarding experience, ensuring these critical brand assets remain intact. Joan Salvatella recalls the early days of this process: “When we got started in 2019, it took us around one week to get a client on board. We had to get a phone number manually. We had to configure the number. We had to make sure that it was compatible with the phone provider that our customers had, and it was a complete pain.”
But since we started working with automation tools and a more automated approach, we could reduce it from one week to a few minutes. Bandwidth here is the go-to for us. We’ve cut down onboarding time by 15% with just the self-serve features.
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
This operational automation is not merely a convenience; it’s central to Bookline’s differentiation. It has helped Bookline meaningfully accelerate time to market for hospitality customers and ensure a seamless transition to AI-powered engagement.
Growing globally, backed by consistent service
With the success of its last-mile adoption approach, Bookline has now scaled to 14 countries and continues to expand in Latin America and Southern Europe.
Bookline understands the need for regional go-to-market teams to help customers get set up with voice AI quickly. But that presents an interesting challenge. Joan explains, “The only way for Bookline to scale with regional teams offering fast GTM in various countries is to count on technical solutions that help the team be more productive. We can’t scale on the merits of our platform alone. And if we decentralize technology, costs grow. So we needed to find a way that the same technology backing our operations could cover different markets.”
As Bookline looked to expand, it required a provider capable of delivering consistent, programmable voice and messaging services, coupled with efficient operational automation for maximum productivity across geographically dispersed teams.
“Bandwidth enabled us to automate the whole process of onboarding a customer on the telephony side. Before working with Bandwidth, we had local providers that did not provide an API. And this implied that someone had to do the whole process of getting numbers and getting them ready so that we could connect them to our platform. The API that Bandwidth provides was key to us having centralized technology that covers all the geographically distributed go-to-market teams.”
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
Equally important to scaling successfully is navigating complex regional regulations. Delivering uniform services across multiple countries, particularly within the highly regulated communications sector, presents significant challenges for a rapidly growing start-up like Bookline. Joan highlights the complexity of staying proactively informed about regulatory changes and adapting operational processes accordingly.
This is where Bookline has leaned on the Bandwidth partnership to supplement its own efforts. Joan notes:
“Bandwidth’s way of approaching compliance by default helps startups like us ensure we are set up for success. And this really helps. Especially for companies that are getting started like us, we don’t have the resources to do this on our own.”
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
Building a custom tech stack for stand-out services
Bookline prides itself on its ability to integrate with its customers’ CRM platforms (each country may have a different major player) and offer the end users all available booking options in real-time. For this, it needed as much flexibility as possible to build its own tech stack, supported by reliable communications.
“We didn’t want all-in-one providers like Twilio or others because that’s the core of my technology. We want to use ours, not theirs. But we also cannot be building everything else when traditional telcos just give me the metal. We needed this intermediate layer that could help us focus on where I add value. And that’s why we’re such a power user of Bandwidth. We get the perfect flexibility to build our stack our way while integrating telephony as intuitively as possible.”
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
Transforming how the Hospitality industry responds
Bookline isn’t just steadily growing its global presence. The company is quietly pioneering an ambitious vision for the hospitality industry—shifting from reactive service to contextualized, proactive care for end users. Joan explains, “It’s our aspiration to be the conversational AI reference for hospitality worldwide.”
A vital step toward this vision is empowering customers to self-onboard, a process significantly enhanced through API-driven operational automation.
“One of the key features of Bandwidth’s Universal platform is that we can automate number ordering and integrate it with our platform. So it accelerates onboarding as our customers will be able to order numbers themselves without Bookline having to manually place orders through the Bandwidth platform.”
Joan Salvatella, Co-founder
In navigating its growth trajectory, Bookline has clearly identified where to focus its technological innovations and where to rely on strong partnerships. “Bandwidth has been essential in the customer support that they provide so we can provide the best customer support that we can offer. Working with top-notch providers is essential if you want to be a top-notch provider for your customers,” concludes Joan.