How fast should hotels reply to booking inquiries?

A booking inquiry is a guest with dates, a budget and a decision to make. In my experience at our own hotels, the inquiries that wait longest are the ones that come in the evening, at weekends and during the afternoon check-in rush — exactly when nobody has time for the inbox. This guide explains why speed matters, what research there is (and its limits), how to measure your own response time, and how to reply quickly without adding staff.

Why the first good answer often wins

• Guests ask several hotels at once. Sending the same e-mail to three or four hotels takes a minute. Whoever answers clearly first sets the price and the expectations.
• The guest is ready now. When someone writes "do you have a room on Saturday?", they are planning right now. By the next morning they may have booked through an online travel agency, where availability is shown instantly.
• A slow reply says something about the stay. Guests read the speed and tone of the reply as a preview of the service.
• Unanswered inquiries are invisible losses. Nobody complains about the e-mail they never got an answer to — they just book somewhere else, and you never find out.

What the research says — and what it does not

There is surprisingly little recent, public research on response time and conversion for hotel e-mails specifically. Here is what we found and could verify:

• Online sales leads in general. A study published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 audited 2,241 US companies by sending web-generated test leads. 37% responded within an hour, 23% never responded at all, and the average response time among companies that answered within 30 days was 42 hours. In a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or more. Note the limits: these are sales leads across many industries, not hotel guests, and "qualify" was defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker, not a completed sale.
• Hotel e-mail responsiveness. Academic "mystery guest" studies have tested how hotels answer e-mail inquiries for more than twenty years. One of them, covering 260 hotels in Tunisia, found that guests had about one chance in ten of getting a reply within a day. The study is from 2003 and from one market, so do not read it as today's benchmark — but it shows that slow or missing replies are an old problem, not a new one.

Some vendors publish hotel response-time figures as well, but often without a method we could check, so we have left them out. The most reliable number is your own: measure it as described below.

Sources: Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (figures as quoted in SmartCompany, "Are you letting online leads go cold?", 1 July 2011), retrieved 2026-10-07; Gherissi-Labben, Schegg & Murphy, "E-mail customer service in the Tunisian hotel industry", Tourism Review 58(2), 2003, retrieved 2026-10-07

Recommended response-time targets

Example targets that a small or mid-sized hotel can actually keep. Adjust them to your staffing.

How to measure your own response time

You do not need special software. Use your inbox and a spreadsheet for an hour:

1. Pick a sample. Last month's booking inquiries — or the last 30 to 50 if you get many. Skip newsletters, OTA notifications and invoices.
2. Note two times per inquiry: when it arrived, and when your first reply was sent (check the sent folder).
3. Calculate the wait in minutes, and mark whether it arrived during staffed hours.
4. Mark the outcome: did it become a booking?
5. Look at three numbers: the median wait, the share answered within one hour, and the booking rate for fast versus slow replies.

The rows above are made-up examples of the format. Once you have your own numbers, put them into the lost revenue calculator to see what the slow replies are likely costing you per year.

Routines that make fast replies normal

• One owner per shift. "Everyone checks the inbox" usually means nobody does. Name the person on the roster.
• Templates for the top ten questions. Availability, prices, parking, check-in times, cancellation, pets, breakfast, groups, late checkout, directions. Copy, adjust, send.
• Answer first, then check details. If you need to check something, reply now with what you know and say when the rest will come.
• Inbox check at fixed times during busy periods — for example every 30 minutes during check-in.
• A useful out-of-hours reply instead of silence (template below).
• Measure once a month and share the number with the team.

Template 1: Immediate acknowledgement (staffed hours, needs checking)

Template 2: Out-of-hours reply that still helps

Example: an evening inquiry answered at once

An illustrative example of a reply sent within seconds at 21:40 by an AI e-mail assistant such as BookingWatch, using the hotel's own facts and availability — instead of the guest waiting until the next morning:

If you want this for your own hotel, read what to look for in an AI e-mail assistant, or start smaller with ChatGPT and a good prompt. BookingWatch's prices are on the pricing page.

Common mistakes

• Waiting to reply until you have checked every detail — while the guest books elsewhere.
• Answering an e-mail with a phone call the guest cannot take.
• An automatic reply that only says "thank you for your e-mail" with no time promise or booking link.
• Nobody owning the inbox during check-in, evenings or weekends.
• Answering only half the questions, which costs another round of e-mails and another day.
• Never measuring response time, so slow replies stay invisible.