Food Hotel Tech · Stand V11 · Startup Village · April 14–15, 2026 · Paris Expo Porte de Versailles

Published by j-AIme.fr · April 2026

Your hotel is fully booked on weekends, your restaurant receives excellent online reviews… and yet, every Monday morning the reception inbox is overflowing with messages from Friday evening. Availability requests unanswered for 60 hours. Customers who have meanwhile booked somewhere else.

This paradox — offering excellent face-to-face service while leaving communications unanswered for hours or days — affects a large majority of independent establishments. It is not a matter of motivation or team competence. It is a structural issue: customer communications arrive 24 hours a day, but your teams are present only 8 hours a day. And when they are there, they have other priorities.

The good news: artificial intelligence has reached a level of maturity that allows this problem to be addressed at its root — not with basic chatbots that respond “your request has been received,” but with agents capable of consulting your PMS in real time, modifying a reservation, taking an order over the phone, managing allergens, and intelligently transferring to a human when the situation requires it.

That is exactly what OmniDesk and Celeste, the two solutions developed by j-AIme.fr, offer.

Before talking about solutions, we need to measure the scale of the problem. And the numbers are more striking than people usually think.

In hospitality:

• A receptionist spends on average 4 to 7 minutes per email: reading, consulting the PMS, writing, proofreading, sending.

• In a 30 to 80-room hotel receiving 100 emails per week, this represents between 7 and 12 hours of weekly work spent on repetitive tasks.

• The manual entry error rate is estimated at 15% in the sector — errors that generate disputes at check-in, incorrectly billed nights, and contradictory confirmations.

• Messages sent outside opening hours — evening, night, weekends — often represent 40 to 50% of total volume, and receive a reply the next day at best.

In restaurants:

• In France, establishments miss on average 60% of their calls during service hours — the lunch rush or evening preparation.

• 85% of customers who do not receive an answer do not call back: they dial a competitor’s number.

• Based on an average ticket of €35 and a reasonable conversion rate, the cost of these missed calls reaches €1,500 to €3,000 in lost revenue per month.*

• During service, each interruption to answer the phone costs 2 to 4 minutes of concentration to the interrupted person — in addition to the time of the call itself.

Restaurant sector averages France 2024.*

The difficulty is that these costs are invisible. You do not see the reservations that never happen, the customers who never call back, the reception hours absorbed by tasks nobody chose. And precisely because they are invisible, they rarely get addressed.

Most hoteliers who have tried to automate their communications have gone through the same steps: a chatbot on the website, an automatic email reply, sometimes an enriched FAQ. And most have experienced the same disappointment.

The fundamental technical problem is the connection to the PMS. Most available tools connect to the hotel management system in read-only mode — they can display information but cannot act on the data. A guest asks to move their check-in forward by one day? The chatbot replies “your request has been forwarded to our team.” The receptionist receives the request via internal email. They must then make the change manually in the PMS and send back a confirmation. The automation has created an extra step, not saved time.

The second problem is vocabulary generalization. Tools designed for all industries do not understand the nuances of the hotel business. “A quiet room facing the courtyard,” “a baby crib for an 18-month-old,” “the same room type as during our stay in June”: an experienced receptionist handles these requests instinctively by cross-referencing several sources of information. A generic AI ignores them or answers incorrectly.

The third limitation is channel fragmentation. Email on one side, WhatsApp on another, website Messenger, chatbot… Each channel has its own interface, history, notifications. A request sent on WhatsApp on Friday evening may go unnoticed until Monday. And if the same client also sent an email, no one knows.

OmniDesk was designed to solve the three problems simultaneously: deep PMS integration, understanding of hospitality vocabulary, and unification of all written channels into a single interface.

Where most solutions only read your PMS, OmniDesk connects through a certified bi-directional API with MisterBooking, Mews and Opera. This means the AI can not only consult availability, pricing, and customer files in real time — it can also modify a reservation, send a secure payment link, update a guest profile, without a team member needing to intervene. That is the difference between an assistant that takes notes and one that takes action.

OmniDesk understands requests expressed naturally by guests: “I’d like a quiet room, preferably with a garden view,” “we’ll arrive after 10 pm, is late check-in possible?”, “do you have an extra bed for our 4-year-old son?” The AI contextualizes each response based on the guest’s real history in the PMS, their past preferences, and previous stays. It does not respond generically — it responds like a receptionist who knows the guest.

Email, WhatsApp, Messenger and the website chatbot are all centralized in a single dashboard. The team sees all ongoing exchanges with their status (handled by AI, awaiting human validation, escalated). Simple requests — availability, arrival confirmation, check-out times, additional rates — are handled and answered automatically. Complex or sensitive cases are flagged immediately, with a context summary, so the receptionist can take over with all the necessary information.

OmniDesk automatically detects the language of the incoming message and replies in the same language — natively in French, English, Spanish, German and Italian. For an international clientele, this provides a seamless experience without additional setup.

💡Based on 100 emails per week: 70% of messages handled automatically, 15 hours saved, 80% reduction in input errors, 25% improvement in measured customer satisfaction. Positive ROI from the first month. Operational integration in 2 to 5 business days.

Email and messaging do not cover all customer interactions. The phone remains the preferred channel for a large portion of your clientele — groups who want to speak to someone before booking, seniors for whom picking up the phone is more natural than filling out an online form, foreign guests who prefer confirming information verbally. And this is precisely where establishments are most exposed.

Celeste answers on the first ring, 24/7. Its voice synthesis technology (“Speech-to-Speech”) produces a fluid conversation with a response time of under one second. The pace of the exchange is natural enough that customers may not necessarily notice the difference from a human interlocutor. Celeste greets, reformulates if necessary, asks clarifying questions, and guides the caller to their request.

Celeste knows your menu in detail: every dish, every price, every ingredient, every customization option. But above all, it manages the 14 regulated allergens: if a customer mentions an allergy or intolerance, Celeste instantly filters your menu and proposes only compatible dishes. This is also a feature that protects the establishment’s liability.

Updates are immediate. A dish out of stock, a change in opening hours for holidays, a flash promotion for the evening: from the Celeste dashboard, accessible on mobile, a change takes less than a minute and is applied instantly. No more risk of customers booking based on outdated information.

For restaurants, Celeste handles voice ordering end-to-end: dish selection, customization (“no onions,” “sauce on the side”), delivery zone verification, total calculation, preparation time estimation, confirmation. For table reservations, it manages time slots, number of guests, special preferences, and particular requests (birthday, vegetarian diet, terrace table).

Celeste detects situations beyond its scope — a complex complaint, a specific commercial request, a frustrated customer — and transfers the call to the number of your choice. The transfer is automatically accompanied by a complete summary of the conversation: your team takes over informed, without the customer having to repeat everything.

💡Celeste is operational in less than 30 minutes. It automatically scrapes your website to extract the menu, prices and allergens. You configure the greeting message, opening hours and specific instructions. You redirect your calls to its dedicated number. That’s it. Data hosted in the EU, strict GDPR compliance, no data resold to third parties.

OmniDesk and Celeste are not two independent products combined to create a broader offer. They were designed together to cover the entire spectrum of incoming communications: written channels with OmniDesk, voice with Celeste. It is the first architecture that guarantees no customer request goes unanswered quickly — whatever the channel, whatever the time.

Concretely, here is what it changes in daily operations:

• A guest sends an email at 11 pm to modify their stay: OmniDesk processes it in the PMS, sends confirmation, and the receptionist finds the updated file in the morning.

• A group calls at 2:30 pm to book a table for 12: Celeste handles the reservation while the entire team is in service.

• A Japanese traveler sends a question on WhatsApp in Japanese: OmniDesk detects the language, consults the PMS, and replies in Japanese in under 10 seconds.

• A customer allergic to shellfish calls to order: Celeste filters the menu in real time and proposes only compatible dishes.

This design coherence is no coincidence. j-AIme.fr was founded by Hervé Debbah, who graduated in artificial intelligence in 1982 (Master’s in AI & Image Processing, UPMC) and owned the VIP Paris Yacht Hôtel & Spa in Paris for 13 years. Unable to find a solution on the market capable of truly acting within his PMS, he decided to build one.

Both solutions are modular, require no heavy infrastructure, and integrate with your existing organization. OmniDesk is operational in 2 to 5 days. Celeste in less than 30 minutes. No extended training is required. AI handles the repetitive volume; your teams remain in control of what creates real value.

💡Come test OmniDesk and Celeste in real conditions at stand V11 (Startup Village) during Food Hotel Tech 2026. In 15 minutes, send a real email to OmniDesk and watch it query the PMS and respond. Speak with Celeste using a real menu. See call transfers, real-time updates and allergen management. Not a prerecorded demo — a live demonstration with your own data.

Information and appointments: www.j-aime.fr · contact@j-aime.fr · 01 49 84 60 03