Local guides · Post 37
Answering the same guest question in Welsh and English
For guest houses, cafes and activity operators in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire: how the same guest question arriving in two languages takes a slice out of every working day.
A couple from Tenby books three nights in Cardigan and writes in Welsh. A family from Aberaeron asks the same thing in English. A visitor in St Davids wants to know about parking. Someone in New Quay asks whether the boat still runs in October. It all lands in the same inbox on the same morning.
The questions repeat. Check-in time, dogs, parking, breakfast, the coast path, the weather. The Welsh version deserves a proper Welsh reply, not a machine pass. So someone reads it, works out an answer and sends it. Then does the English one.
By Friday that is a couple of hours gone, and it is a couple of hours that comes back every week of the season. That repeating job is the loop: the bilingual guest reply.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
Picture the same question arriving in Welsh and in English on the same morning. The drafting is the slow part, and the checking is the part you would never skip.
Assume one person spends about 25 minutes a day on Welsh replies to questions you have answered many times before. Assume an hourly rate of £14 for the office side of a small hospitality business.
- × 25 minutes a day = the Welsh reply time
- × £14 an hour = about £5.80 a day
- × six days a week = about £35 a week
- × 40 weeks of season = about £1,400 a season
Both numbers are assumptions, not measurements from any business. Yours will differ. What matters is the shape: small each day, large across a season.
Score it: the three checks
- Hours. Half an hour a day in season, closer to an hour in August. That clears the bar for a done-for-you build, because the time comes back every week rather than once.
- Repeat. The questions repeat and so do the answers. Ten common replies written on one page in both languages are enough for a new starter to run the loop without asking.
- Risk-if-wrong. A clumsy Welsh sentence can read as careless to a guest who chose to write in Welsh. A wrong date or price can lose a booking. That decides who checks it: a Welsh speaker for the Welsh, the owner or manager for the tone, and a person for anything about money.
Try one thing this week (free)
Write your ten most common guest questions and your English answers on one sheet. Then sit with the Welsh speaker on your team and have them say the Welsh version of each answer out loud, marking the ones where the wording shifts. That sheet is the spec for the loop, and by Friday you will know whether it is worth handing over.
Where a person stays
Software can hold your answers, spot which question has come in and prepare a draft in both languages. It cannot be trusted to write Welsh on its own, and we will not claim it can. A Welsh speaker on your team reads the Welsh draft and approves or corrects it. The English draft is approved by whoever owns the tone that week. Nothing sends until a named person has said yes, and anything touching money, compliance or legal terms stays approval-only, always.
FAQ
Yes. The loop needs one named person who can check Welsh. Without that person, we would not build it.
Treat them as a starting point that a Welsh speaker corrects. The aim is to save the typing, not to replace the person who knows the language.
It leaves the routine queue and goes to a person to answer from scratch. The software does not invent an answer for a guest.
We would not set it up that way. If a guest writes in Welsh, the reply should meet them in Welsh. The loop exists to make that manageable, not to make it optional.
The £499 diagnostic. One fixed fee: a one-hour call, a written report, and a 30-minute follow-up that ranks what to build first. 5 hours a week found or a full refund, and the fee credits in full against any build.