Customer
Twelve villas, a national park, and a rate card too complex to guess at.
Kotiyagala Luxury Villas was the property Yalu was built for. It's still the one everything gets tested against.
- Property
- Kotiyagala Luxury Villas
- Where
- Beside Yala National Park, Sri Lanka
- Size
- 12 rooms across 7 acres
- Live on
- Website widget, WhatsApp and a trade portal
The problem
Four things a generic chatbot would have got wrong.
Guests in every timezone
Bookings come from Europe, Australia and India. The inquiries that mattered most were arriving while the property was asleep, and by morning the guest had usually booked elsewhere.
A rate card no chatbot could handle
Four seasons, three board bases, extra-adult supplements, children priced by age band, festive-period surcharges and safari add-ons. Any assistant that generated prices instead of calculating them would eventually quote a number the property had to honour.
The same questions, endlessly
Is it safe with children. How far from the park gate. What happens if it rains. How do we get there from Colombo. All answerable — but only if someone is awake to answer them.
Resident rates that couldn't leak
Sri Lankan residents pay a different, lower rate. Getting that wrong in either direction — showing it to an overseas guest, or withholding it from someone entitled to it — was a real commercial risk.
What we built
Six decisions that made it trustworthy.
Yalu on the website and WhatsApp
One assistant, both channels, with the formatting adapted to each. A guest who starts on the site and follows up on WhatsApp stays a single lead rather than becoming two.
A quote engine, not a price guess
The whole rate card became a calculator: seasons, board basis, extra adults, children's ages, festive supplements, safari add-ons. Three nights over Christmas Eve for four people, All Inclusive, returns an exact total. Dates outside the loaded card return an honest “I can't quote that” rather than an invented figure.
Residency handled as a rule, not a hint
The resident rate is released only when a guest explicitly says they're a resident and is on a Sri Lankan number — never inferred from their name, their language or their phone alone, and hardened against people trying to talk their way into it.
Kalu for the team
Ishan and Sha work the pipeline from their phones. Follow-ups wait in their Inbox to be edited or skipped, and nothing Kalu writes goes out under their names until they've read it.
Holds in eZee, at the quoted price
Yalu checks real availability in eZee and places a 48-hour courtesy hold — but only when eZee prices the stay at exactly what Yalu quoted, safari included. Anything else goes to Ishan and Sha to set up by hand.
Room allocation around the estate
Every upcoming booking gets a suggested villa: close pairs for two-villa families, sea views for anniversaries, the villas nearest the main building for guests who need easy access — and no one-night gaps nobody can sell.
Mithu for travel agents and DMCs
Agents who email for rates are invited to a trade portal where Mithu teaches them the villas, the team approves their business, and approved partners place holds for their clients by emailed code.
Live chat when it matters
The team can see who's on the website, step into a conversation from their phones, and reply in English while the guest reads German. When they go quiet, Yalu picks it back up.
Notices that both assistants respect
When a park entrance closes or a villa goes offline for maintenance, the team tells Kalu once. Yalu stops guessing about it immediately.
Unanswered questions as a work queue
Anything Yalu couldn't answer is logged word-for-word and flagged for the team. Answering it once feeds it back into what the assistant knows — the knowledge base grows out of real guest questions rather than a workshop.
Yalu
Kotiyagala Luxury Villas
Offers value, never a discount
On results
We're not going to put an invented percentage on this page.
Kotiyagala has been live for months, not years, at a twelve-room property. Any “+40% direct bookings” headline we printed would be a number we made up, and you'd be right not to believe it. What we can tell you is what the system does, what it refuses to do, and exactly how it behaves when it doesn't know something.
On a demo call we'll walk you through the real dashboard and you can judge the conversations yourself.
See it answer a question about your hotel.
Thirty minutes. We'll load a little of your own content in first, so you're watching it handle your property — not a demo script.