Why the Owner of Aloft Dublin-Pleasanton Calls Lance His Clearest ROI Decision

Aloft Dublin-Pleasanton sits just off the 580/680 interchange in the East Bay: a select-service property with the brand's signature W XYZ bar, a busy lobby, and a lean team that has to cover all of it. At a hotel this size there is no back office full of coordinators. The person answering the phone is the same person checking a guest in, sorting a room move, and chasing a housekeeping request — and the phone does not care how many people are standing at the desk. For an owner-operator like Rupesh Patel, who runs Aloft alongside a Courtyard in Pittsburg and a Holiday Inn Express in Modesto, that math repeats at every property. Every missed call is a guest who books elsewhere or a request that never lands. Adding a body at the desk for coverage is the most expensive way to answer a phone, and it still leaves the night shift thin.

Lance went live at Aloft as the property's AI front desk. It answers every guest call in a natural voice, around the clock, pulling from the hotel's own knowledge: parking, breakfast hours, the shuttle, early check-in, the W XYZ bar's closing time. Requests become tracked tasks instead of hallway messages. Group and event inquiries are captured as leads instead of voicemails. And when a call actually needs a person — a complaint, an emergency, a guest who wants a human — Lance hands it straight to the desk. The team at the desk keeps working with the guest in front of them; the phone stops deciding how their shift goes. The same playbook now runs across Rupesh's other properties, IHG and Marriott flags alike, from one owner's dashboard rather than three separate routines.

The economics of a select-service hotel are unforgiving: revenue is capped by the room count, so the operating line is where an owner wins or loses. Lance replaced the most expensive coverage problem on that line — staffing a phone that rings around the clock — with software that answers every call and turns the important ones into work the team can see and close. That is the calculation behind Rupesh's verdict. Not a technology bet, a margin decision: the system pays for itself, the guest gets an answer on the first ring at 2 a.m., and the team's hours go to the people standing in the lobby. It is the same template Lance runs at AC Hotel South San Francisco and across the OTO Development portfolio — proof it holds from a single owner-operator to a fifty-hotel group.