Faster Hotel Email Replies Lose Bookings to Better Answers, Study Finds

A study of 2 million emails across 48 hotels found that guests who received a reply within 15 minutes booked only 37% of the time, while guests who waited 15 to 60 minutes booked 46% of the time. Speed, the industry's standard metric for email performance, was a poor predictor of conversion.

The report, "Inside the Hotel Inbox 2026," was published on 28 October 2026 by Oslo-based Altek AI. It covers 2 million anonymized emails at 48 hotels in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France and Switzerland, collected from December 2024 to September 2026. The booking findings rest on 9,239 guest enquiries. Large group bookings, meetings and events are excluded. Altek AI sells software for hotels, a fact the company discloses alongside its methodology.

What makes a reply convert?

Only about 1 in 8 replies gave guests everything they needed to book. The report defines a complete answer as one that does four things: confirms whether a room is available, recommends one room, answers every question, and asks for the booking. Replies that did all four were linked to a 58% booking rate. Replies that did none of them converted at 4%.

The gap between hotels is wide. Booking rates from email enquiries ranged from 19% at the lowest-converting properties to 55% at the highest. The report does not name the hotels.

How much money sits in unanswered offers?

Follow-up behavior is the study's sharpest finding. Some 34% of guests went quiet after receiving an offer. Only 2% of them received a follow-up from the hotel. Together, those unanswered offers represented an estimated €3.7 million in potential booking value.

The report is candid about the limits of that figure: "We do not know how many of these offers a follow-up could turn into bookings. Almost no hotel has tried."

Is this a staffing problem?

The report assigns no blame to hotel staff. The person answering emails often checks in guests and handles the phone at the same time, and most hotels measure only response times.

"For years, hotels have been measured on how fast they reply. Speed matters, and every guest deserves a quick answer. But when speed becomes the only goal, the reply becomes about clearing the inbox, not about helping the guest decide. Speed alone doesn't win the booking. The answer does," said Kristoffer Pedersen, co-founder of Altek AI.

Pedersen added: "This isn't about teams doing a bad job. Front desks and reservations teams are emptying a full inbox every day, so there's no time to go back to the guest who got an offer four days ago. For most hotels the inbox is a black box. Managers can see how many emails were answered, but not how many turned into bookings."

What should hotels change?

The report offers two immediate actions:

• Answer so the guest can say yes: state availability, recommend one room, answer every question, and ask for the booking.
• Follow up between day 3 and day 7. Half of the guests who replied to an offer did so within 3 days, and 8 in 10 within a week. After that, very few return on their own.

The report cannot say what that follow-up message should contain. "So few hotels follow up that there isn't enough data. That's one of the things we'll look at next," Pedersen said.

What are the study's limits?

A booking is counted only when the email thread shows the guest confirmed it. Bookings completed later by phone, on the hotel's website or through a booking platform cannot always be linked, so booking rates may be understated. The findings show relationships, not proof of cause and effect.

That caveat matters. The 58% conversion figure for complete answers is a correlation, not a demonstration that the four-step formula causes bookings. Altek plans to extend the next edition to groups, meetings and events. Pedersen presents the findings at HTN in Amsterdam on 29 October.