If you run a UK business that takes bookings or reservations, your booking platform is the engine of your business. It takes payments, manages availability, sends confirmations, and keeps track of customers. This article looks at how booking platforms are approaching AI today from where they see clear opportunities for automation to where they continue to rely on people.

What have booking platforms automated?

Across the UK market, most booking platforms are investing in automation where it improves efficiency, consistency, and scale without changing how customers interact.

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1. Reminders and notifications: Most platforms now use automation to:

• Send booking confirmations and reminders
• Reduce no-shows
• Prompt customers to rebook at the right time

The really smart ones are now also using AI too personalise these automated messages, increasing relevancy and the likelihood the customer takes the action you want them too.

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2. Marketing and demand insights: Another area of focus is analyse booking data to provide insights. Common examples include:

• Identifying repeat booking patterns
• Suggesting when customers are likely to return
• Highlighting under-utilised availability

Again the smart platforms are deploying AI to make this task simpler. Adding an AI agent to your booking data is like hiring a full time analyst. The best platforms are integrating these capabilities so you can get easy access to insights without needing to do the number crunching.

Where booking platforms still rely on humans

Despite increased automation, there are clear areas where most booking platforms still expect humans to stay in the loop. When a customer asks:

• “Can I move my booking to tomorrow?”
• “What happens if I need to cancel?”
• “Can I change the number of people?”

Most booking platforms still expect the merchants team to repsond and resolve. Historically, they’ve been considered too variable to automate safely. Reschedules, cancellations, and edge cases are usually handled manually. Even when rules exist, platforms often stop short of letting software:

• Apply policies automatically
• Update bookings without review
• Communicate final outcomes to customers

Where are booking platforms today?

Across the board, platforms automate structure and data, while people manage requests and judgement.

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Fresha

Fresha is one of the best-known booking platforms for salons and beauty businesses. It uses automation for reminders, marketing, and insights. Customer messages and booking changes remain a human task. Its current plans seem to focus o investing in the payments and financial needs of their target market.

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eola

eola, a UK-based platform for activity providers and tour companies, focuses on modern booking flows and integrations. They’re fast-growing and tech-forward like Fresha. When it comes to AI, their current features lean more towards analytics and automations than true AI agents. Customer conversations and changes are handled by operators.

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Booksy

Booksy is popular with health and wellness businesses. It does a good job with marketing automations and reminders, but again, AI is mostly in the background. There’s no AI agent actively handling customer requests. If a client messages to move their appointment, you’re still the one doing the admin.

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Rezkit

Rezkit is used by a wide range of UK attractions and tour companies. Its strength lies in customisation and distribution, not AI. While it gives you control over how bookings are managed, most of the customer interaction still falls to your team. That makes it powerful but potentially time-consuming if you’re juggling a lot of requests.

Automating the messy middle

We believe the feasibility of automating routine customer requests has increased dramatically in the last 5 years. I tis still not easy, you need well structured data and well designed AI prompts, but the barriers to it have dropped dramatically. Most booking conversations are:

• Repetitive
• Policy-driven
• Time-sensitive
• High volume

This is where newer AI agents are starting to play a role. Breezy is designed to handle routine booking conversations that platforms have historically left to humans. It sits alongside your existing booking platform and:

• Understands customer messages
• Applies your booking rules
• Updates reservations directly
• Sends confirmations automatically

The magic is brings is a contextual understanding of the customers problem, an in-depth understand ing of your business and its rules and the ability to actually take action. For a businesses, the question is no longer “does my booking platform use AI?”. It’s:

• Which tasks are automated?
• Which still interrupt my day?
• What tools should I use to resolve these?
• Where does human effort add the most value?

As booking platforms continue to evolve, AI is increasingly handling the predictable, while people focus on the personal.