AskWhisper review: they put the price on the website, so I did the maths

I have said the same thing in enough of these reviews that I have started to bore myself with it: if I need a demo call to see your pricing, I already know it’s too expensive. So when a colleague forwarded me a Belgian company whose pricing page has four rates on it, two stated minimums and a setup fee printed where everyone can see it, I was going to test it whatever else it turned out to be.

AskWhisper is an AI front desk for hotels. It answers guests on WhatsApp, webchat and email, it answers the telephone if you pay for that module, it sends the pre-arrival and in-stay messages, it pushes upsells, and it will build and host your website if you want it to. The company was founded in 2024 in Belgium, it has about eight people, and it is working with somewhere north of a hundred properties. I ran it at my 80-room hotel in Amsterdam from late June to the middle of August, alongside the tool I already use, and this is what the spreadsheet says.

The pricing page, which is the point

Here is the whole thing, because it fits in a paragraph and that is remarkable in itself.

The communication suite is €7 per room per month, with a €21 monthly minimum. There is a one-off setup fee of €399. Then three add-ons, each priced per room per month: a managed website at €4 with a €49 minimum, voice AI at €2, and digital room keys at €2. Hotel groups can ask for a custom arrangement. That is the lot, and I did not have to speak to anybody to learn it.

Compare that with what I have had to do elsewhere. Guestline still will not publish a rate and I have colleagues who have been on it for years. The SuitePad tablets I piloted this spring took a fifteen-minute sales call and I still could not get a per-room number out of them. Optii put a confidentiality clause about the price in the proposal. Against that, four numbers and two minimums on a public page is not a small thing, and I want to say so clearly before I start taking it apart.

What €7 a room actually costs

The €7 headline is a real number. It is also the first of up to four, and they stack per room.

At my eighty rooms, the communication suite alone is €560 a month, which is €6,720 a year. Add the website at €4 and you are at €880. Add voice at €2 and keys at €2 and the full stack is €15 per room per month: €1,200 a month, €14,400 a year, plus the €399 to start.

Run the same arithmetic at twenty rooms and the full stack is €300 a month. That is a different product in commercial terms, and it explains the €21 minimum, which at €7 a room describes a three-room property. This is a tool priced for small independents and guesthouses, and the per-room model does what per-room models always do: it rewards them and it punishes me.

For context from my own spreadsheet, the askng.it Standard tier I run at my own hotel costs €360 a month and has no setup fee, and when I costed chatlyn its flat tiers topped out around €311 before WhatsApp message costs. That last figure is already history: chatlyn pulled its published tiers this year and now quotes per room against your setup, so I could not repeat that comparison today even if I wanted to. Which rather makes the point. The honest position is that AskWhisper’s communication suite is the dearest per-room option I have costed in this category, and it is one of the shrinking number where I could work that out without booking anything.

I would not take the website module. I said the same about Amenitiz and the reasoning has not changed: an established eighty-room hotel already has a website it has paid for, and swapping it for a managed template to save a booking-engine click is not a trade I would make. Worth flagging that a custom domain is not included in that €4 either, which is an odd thing to leave out of a website product.

The WhatsApp number problem, which is nobody’s fault

I could not run AskWhisper on my WhatsApp channel, because askng.it is already on it and the WhatsApp Business API binds one number to one provider. That is not a criticism of AskWhisper, it is true of every tool in this category, and it is worth stating plainly because it shapes what an honest trial can even look like.

If you are already running a WhatsApp tool, you cannot A/B test a replacement on your real guest traffic. You either migrate, with the two-week Meta verification that James has written about at length, or you test on a second number that no guest knows. I did the second: AskWhisper took webchat, email and the phone on our second line, plus a WhatsApp number of its own that I pushed a slice of pre-arrival traffic to by hand. Roughly six weeks of real conversations, not a sandbox, but not my main channel either. Judge my WhatsApp observations accordingly.

Voice, which is the part I did not expect

The phone module is the reason this review is not just a pricing note.

I went in thinking this was the one thing nobody else did, and I was wrong, so let me correct myself before I praise it. Runnr.ai sells a voice agent and has done for a while, and Canary has a voice product too. HiJiffy, chatlyn and askng.it do not answer calls, and askng.it only logs them on its Premium tier. So the phone is not AskWhisper’s private garden. It is a feature three of the tools we cover now sell, and most of the category still assumes the guest types. My guests do not all type. The ones who ring at half past eight in the evening asking whether we have parking, whether reception is open when their train gets in, and whether the room has a bath are ringing precisely because they do not want to type, and until now the answer at my hotel has been a person or nothing.

Voice AI at €2 a room answered those. In Dutch, English and German across the month I had it switched on, and it routed to the front desk when it lost the thread, which it did more often than the chat equivalent does. Parking, breakfast times, late arrival, luggage storage: those it handled. Anything with a condition in it, anything where the guest was really asking for a favour rather than a fact, went to a human, and I would rather that than the alternative.

Two caveats. The handover is audible, so the guest knows they have been passed on, and some of them find that irritating. And this is the one place where the pricing page stops being transparent: usage limits apply, and the limits are not stated anywhere I could find. For a company that publishes everything else, leaving the ceiling off the metered product is the gap I would most like them to close.

What the integration list tells you, and what it doesn’t

The published PMS list is a good one: Mews, Apaleo, Cloudbeds, RoomRaccoon, Lighthouse, Protel, Clock PMS+ and MyTourist. That covers most of what a European independent is likely to be running, and Cloudbeds lists AskWhisper in its own marketplace, which is at least a second party confirming the connection exists.

The €399 setup fee buys the PMS connection and the knowledge base build, and I want to be fair about it: that work was done, properly, by someone who asked sensible questions about our rate structure rather than sending me a spreadsheet to fill in. If you are going to charge a setup fee, this is how to earn it.

Locks are Salto and only Salto. If you have Salto, the digital key module at €2 a room is a tidy piece of work. If you have anything else, that module does not exist for you, and I would rather they said so on the pricing page than list it as an add-on everyone can buy. askng.it names four lock vendors, including Omnitec, Hotek and FlexiPass; that is the comparison, and it is not a close one.

The Belgian question

Here is where my 6 comes from, and it is not about the software.

The customer list is C-Hotels on the coast, Corsendonk, The Ostendian, Upstairs, YALO, JAM in Ghent, Mix in Brussels, the Urbanist in Ghent. Every one of them Belgian. The company is Belgian, it was established with support from Flanders Investment and Trade, and it is about eight people.

Marc would call that a feature, and on the sovereignty argument he would be right: a Belgian company serving Belgian hotels is about as European as this category gets, and it is a relief after a season of reviewing tools that keep passport scans in San Francisco. But I am not Marc, and what I see in that list is concentration. A hundred properties in one small country means the product has been shaped by one market’s habits, the support team works in one time zone with one set of holidays, and every reference you are offered is somebody the founders can probably ring personally.

I could not find one independent hotelier outside Belgium talking about this tool anywhere. Not one. The performance figures on the site are all unsourced: ninety per cent of messages answered without a human, a median response under ten seconds, twenty-four thousand euros of upsell revenue in three months at one property. Those may all be true. I have no way to check any of them, and neither do you, and a vendor that has been this open about price should understand better than most why an unsourced revenue claim reads as marketing.

The other thing two years buys you is nothing much in the way of a plan for what happens next. Contract terms are described as depending on the size and setup of your property, which after four published rates is the one place they go soft. I asked, and got a flexible answer. Ask in writing.

Where I would put it

If you run twenty rooms in Flanders or the Netherlands, want the phone answered as well as the chat, and can live with a young supplier, AskWhisper makes sense and the maths is on your side, though price Runnr.ai alongside it because it does voice too: €140 a month for the communication suite, €40 more for voice, everything published, and a company small enough that your problem is somebody’s actual problem.

If you run eighty rooms in a city, as I do, it is dearer than what I already have and the case has to be built on the voice module, because that is the only thing on the list I cannot buy elsewhere. For me it did not get there this season. Voice was the argument, and voice turns out to be available elsewhere, including from a Dutch competitor that publishes its prices and connects to far more of the stack.

And if you run a group, or anything on a long contract, do the due diligence you would do on any two-year-old supplier holding your guest data and your guest app. Published pricing is a sign of confidence and I am glad to see it. It is not a track record.

If you are still drawing up a shortlist, every one of the guest communication tools we have paid for and run at our own hotels sits in one place, with what each of them costs.

AskWhisper pricing and setup: common questions

How much does AskWhisper cost?

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The communication suite is €7 per room per month with a €21 monthly minimum, plus a one-off €399 setup fee. Three add-ons are priced per room per month: a managed website at €4 with a €49 minimum, voice AI at €2, and digital room keys at €2. At my 80 rooms the suite alone is €560 a month; all four modules together would be €1,200 a month, or €14,400 a year.

Does AskWhisper answer the phone?

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Yes. The voice AI add-on is €2 per room per month, handles several languages, and routes to a human when it cannot cope. It managed parking, breakfast times, luggage storage and late arrivals at my hotel; anything conditional went to the front desk. It is not alone in this though: Runnr.ai and Canary both sell voice agents, and Runnr publishes its pricing as well. The gap specific to AskWhisper is that its voice usage limits are mentioned but never quantified.

Which PMS does AskWhisper connect to?

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The published list is Mews, Apaleo, Cloudbeds, RoomRaccoon, Lighthouse, Protel, Clock PMS+ and MyTourist. Cloudbeds also lists AskWhisper in its own marketplace, which is a second party confirming that one. The €399 setup fee covers building the connection and the knowledge base, and in my case that work was done properly.

Can I run AskWhisper alongside my current WhatsApp tool?

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Not on the same number. The WhatsApp Business API binds one number to one provider, so if you already run a messaging tool you either migrate or test AskWhisper on a second number. That is true of every tool in this category, not a limitation of this one, but it does mean there is no clean way to A/B test a replacement on your real guest traffic.

Is AskWhisper cheaper than askng.it or chatlyn?

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No, and chatlyn is no longer a fair comparison. At my 80 rooms the AskWhisper communication suite is €560 a month against €360 for askng.it Standard. chatlyn's top flat tier was around €311 when I costed it, but chatlyn has since withdrawn its published tiers and now quotes per room against your setup, so there is no public figure left to hold it against. AskWhisper is the dearest per-room option I have costed, and one of the few where I could establish that without booking a call.

Sophie, for all six of us