A hotel, a B&B, a guest house, a holiday cottage and a spare room on Airbnb are all answering the same question — where should I stay round here? The platforms answer it for fifteen to eighteen per cent. An assistant answers it for nothing, and right now it may not know you exist.
For fifteen years the answer to "where should I stay in Chester?" was a search, then a booking site, then a commission. That route still exists and it still works. But a new route has opened beside it. People are asking an assistant instead — "somewhere with parking near Parkgate", "a dog friendly B&B on the Wirral", "quiet place to stay for a wedding in Chester" — and it answers with two or three names and, if it can find one, a phone number or a website. That is a booking with no commission on it. Which makes being one of those names worth considerably more here than in almost any other trade.
If your Booking.com or Airbnb listing is the only thing describing you, then the platform owns the answer as well as the commission. A simple page of your own, with your name, your town and how to reach you, changes what an assistant has to work with.
"Parking", "dog friendly", "family room", "ground floor", "walk to the station", "EV charger", "late check-in". These are exactly what people ask for, and they are usually a row of small icons — which is a picture, not a sentence.
Pages say "in the heart of the village" rather than naming the village, the town and the county. An assistant will not risk recommending somewhere it cannot place on a map.
If the only route is a platform button, then even a guest who came from an assistant arrives with a commission attached. A number and a direct enquiry form is what turns that visit into a direct booking.
Accommodation gets rung in the evening, from a car, from another country, in a different time zone. A ring-out at nine at night is a booking that goes straight back to the platform.
Your average stay, your conversion, your numbers.
A two-night stay at around £90. ⭐ And this figure understates it twice over: a direct booking also saves the platform commission — roughly £27 to £32 on a stay this size — and it hands you the guest’s own email address, so the second visit costs you nothing at all. Change every number to yours.
We ask the four assistants the question your customers ask and send you their answers word for word. One report, no charge, no account. It is the honest starting point: you cannot fix a thing you have not measured.
A UK number for the business, live in minutes, that is not the phone your family rings. And when you are ready, Optiman Answered picks it up when you cannot — takes the booking, takes the message, and tells you straight away.
One answer from an assistant is a coin toss; they vary by day, wording and where the person is standing. So we ask the SAME questions again every 7, 14 or 28 days and show you the line. That is the difference between a curiosity and evidence.
We cannot move you up Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia or Vrbo. Nobody outside those companies can, and anybody who tells you otherwise is either guessing or selling you something. What we can tell you is the other half, and it is the half nobody is watching. When somebody asks an assistant where to stay in your area, are you named? Which assistants name you, which do not, and which of your competitors comes up instead? And when that person then tries to reach you directly, is there a number, and does anyone answer it? That is a smaller claim than "we will fill your rooms". It is also one we can actually measure and hand you in writing.
You do not need it — you would keep them either way, because they bring volume. The question is what share of your bookings arrives with fifteen to eighteen per cent already taken off it. Every direct booking is the same guest at a better margin, and the assistants are a route to direct bookings that currently costs nothing.
No. Nobody outside Booking.com can, and we will not pretend otherwise. We work on the surface they do not control — what an AI assistant says when somebody asks where to stay in your area, and whether that person can then reach you directly.
Especially. A single-property host has the most to gain from a direct booking and the least ability to absorb a commission — and being named by an assistant costs you nothing per booking, for ever. The free check takes one form and tells you where you stand.
Increasingly, and particularly for the trips that are hardest to search for — a wedding, a funeral, a hospital visit, a dog, a wheelchair, a late arrival. Those are also the guests most likely to ring rather than click. The free check tells you what it says about you today.
Two things. It gives you a booking line that is not your mobile, so guests can be given it publicly. And it can answer when you cannot — an evening enquiry from a car, an overseas caller in the wrong time zone — taking the dates and the name instead of ringing out into a platform booking.
A direct booking line of your own, live in minutes, that answers out of hours.
How a number worksTell us your business name, your town and what you do. We put the question your customers actually ask to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, send you what each one said word for word, and tell you what it would take to change it.