Harbor & Pine Hotels operates 58 boutique properties on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Rocky Mountains. Its guests book months ahead for summer weekends and ski season, and then their plans change: a flight moves, a kid gets sick, a wedding date slips, or they want a bigger room.
Every one of those changes used to become a phone call to the property.
The challenge
Harbor & Pine's central reservations team is 60 people. Each property also has a front desk that takes calls. Together they handled about 95,000 guest conversations a month, and 58% of them were reservation changes: new dates, room type changes, extra nights, early check-in, pet fees, and cancellations.
Each change touched two systems. The booking lived in the central reservation system, and the room inventory and folio lived in the property management system at each hotel. An agent had to check availability, apply the right rate plan, work out whether a cancellation fee applied, and update both systems without creating a duplicate.
That work had costs:
- Two hours per front desk shift spent on the phone, often while guests waited in the lobby.
- A 9% error rate on manual changes, from wrong rate plans to double-booked rooms, each one requiring a manager to fix it at check-in.
- Evening and weekend gaps. Central reservations closed at 9 pm Eastern, which was 6 pm for the Pacific properties.
Harbor & Pine had tried a booking chatbot in 2024. It could show availability but not change a reservation, so it ended most conversations with a phone number.
"Guests didn't want to chat about their reservation. They wanted it changed." — Danielle Okoro, VP Guest Experience
Why Pazau
Harbor & Pine needed an AI that could safely write to its systems. With Pazau Actions, the team connected the reservation system and property management system through their REST APIs: get_reservation, check_availability, modify_reservation, quote_change, cancel_reservation, and add_package.
The controls were what persuaded the revenue team. Every Action runs inside limits Harbor & Pine sets. Pazau Agent can waive a cancellation fee up to $150 on its own. A waiver above that goes to the property's front office manager for one-tap approval in Pazau Inbox. Rate plans are never changed outside the published rules, and every change is recorded in a Trace the revenue team can audit.
The rollout
Harbor & Pine signed in January 2025 and launched in three waves.
February: Actions in the sandbox. The team connected all six Actions against a staging copy of the reservation system. Each write Action got an idempotency key, so a retry could never create a second booking.
March: Procedures. Marco Delgado, director of central reservations, wrote the Procedures the way he trained new agents:
- "Change dates" checks availability at the same property, quotes the rate difference, and modifies the reservation once the guest confirms.
- "Upgrade room type" offers available upgrades with the price difference, and applies the change and the new deposit.
- "Cancel reservation" explains the property's cancellation policy, applies or waives the fee within limits, and processes the refund.
- "Early check-in and late checkout" checks housekeeping forecasts and adds the fee to the folio.
- "Add a package" adds parking, pet stays, spa credits, or ski passes and confirms the new total.
April: Simulation and pilot. The Procedures ran against 5,000 past conversations before launch. Simulation showed the agent was quoting weekday rates on holiday Mondays. Marco added a holiday calendar check, and the rerun passed. Eight coastal properties went live first.
May: All properties, all channels. Pazau Agent went live on web chat, email, SMS, and WhatsApp across all 58 properties. Pazau Voice took over the central reservations line in July.
The results
After six months across the full portfolio:
- 69% of reservation conversations resolved by AI, end-to-end, with the change made in both systems.
- 31,000 front desk calls avoided each month. Front desk phone time fell from two hours a shift to under 25 minutes.
- Change errors fell from 9% to 0.4%. The remaining errors came from rooms taken offline at the property after availability was checked.
- 24/7 changes. 38% of AI-resolved changes now happen outside the old central reservations hours.
- $1.2 million in annual upsell revenue from room upgrades and packages that Pazau Agent offers during date changes, within rules the revenue team approved.
Conversations that need a person still reach one. Pazau Agent hands off group bookings, accessibility requests, and guests who have had a bad stay, with a summary and the reservation already open.
"The part I didn't expect was the upsell. The agent asks every guest who moves dates whether they'd like the ocean-view room for $40 more. Our people never had time to ask." — Marco Delgado, Director of Central Reservations
What's next
Harbor & Pine is connecting its loyalty program so Pazau Agent can apply member rates and redeem points during changes. It is also piloting pre-arrival messages: two days before check-in, the agent will offer early check-in, parking, and dinner reservations, and book them in the same conversation.