Owners often open the conversation with a number: we need four agents. The number usually comes from instinct. A reservations desk should be sized from the calls it has to answer. Too few seats means missed bookings. Too many means people waiting for the phone to ring.
The inputs
- Inbound calls per day, for each property
- How those calls spread across the hours of the day, in the property's local time
- Average handling time for a reservation call, including the work after the call
- Peak days, seasons and local events
- The share of calls currently missed or abandoned
- The booking system, and how long a booking takes in it
- Whether card details are taken on the call
Most properties do not have all of this to hand. Phone-system reports usually provide the first three. An approximate picture is enough to begin with, and the first weeks of live operation correct it.
A simple estimate
Workload is calls multiplied by handling time. Sixty calls a day at six minutes each is six hours of work. An agent is not on calls for a whole shift: breaks, training and gaps between calls take time, and a desk planned to keep every agent busy every minute will leave callers waiting. Dividing the workload by the productive time available per agent, with some slack so calls are answered promptly, gives a first figure.
That estimate is good enough for a small desk. For anything larger, staffing is worked out with standard call-centre queueing methods that account for calls arriving at random and for the service level you want. The principle stays the same: volume and handling time decide the seats.
Hours matter as much as volume
The distribution across the day decides which hours need cover and what kind. A property with steady daytime calls and a thin trickle overnight has two different problems. Daytime needs trained reservations agents. The overnight trickle may be better served by an AI line that answers routine booking calls and hands off exceptions, or by shared overflow cover.
For groups with properties in more than one time zone, the busy hours of each location overlap only partly, which smooths the workload across a shared team. One coverage window is one shift. Covering a second window means a second shift, staffed separately.
Inbound first, outbound with what remains
When a team handles both inbound reservations and outbound calls to past guests, inbound comes first. A missed reservation call is the most visible failure a desk can have, and it loses a booking that was already looking for you. Inbound seats are sized from the call data. Outbound calling uses the remaining capacity and is scheduled in the quieter inbound hours, within permitted calling times for the guests being called.
Seasonality
Hotel call volume moves with the season, the weekend and local events. A fixed seat count is right for some months and wrong for others. It is better to agree at the start how the team flexes through the year.
Review after 30 days
The first month replaces estimates with facts: actual calls per hour, real handling time in your booking system, the true share of calls answered. Review the seat count and the split between inbound and outbound then. A sensible agreement describes the team as up to a certain number of seats, with the final split confirmed after that review.