The Question You Cannot Answer

A guest asks something ordinary — about pricing, about a group, about what happens if they are late. The person answering does not know.

They guess, or they say they will check, and a proportion of those conversations end there.

The questions that actually get asked

Fewer than people expect. In most rooms it is six to ten, repeated endlessly:

What does it cost, really. Not the headline — the total for what they are describing.

Can we do X with a group of N. Capacity, splitting, timing.

What happens if we are late / fewer / more. The conditional questions, which are where guessing is most common.

Can I request a specific person. ⚠️ Frequently the highest-intent question there is, and frequently the least confidently answered.

Is there a minimum / a dress code / a cover. The ones where a wrong answer costs the booking either way — turning away someone who would have been fine, or admitting someone who then complains.

Why the gaps persist

Nobody has written the answers down. Everyone assumes everyone else knows.

The answers changed and the change did not reach the phone. ⚠️ The pricing moved, the policy shifted, and the person taking calls on Tuesday learned neither.

Different people give different answers — which is worse than the gap, because two guests compare notes and one of them was told something wrong.

The one-page fix

An afternoon, once.

Ask three people who take enquiries to list what they get asked. The lists overlap heavily; the union is your set.

Write one answer each. ⚠️ Not a policy — the sentence you would actually say. A policy document gets paraphrased differently by everyone; a sentence gets repeated.

Include the conditional ones. "What if we are late" needs an answer, because the guessed version is what sets the expectation you then have to honour.

Put it where the phone is. ⚠️ This is the part that fails. A document in a shared folder is not where someone is standing at 19:00 with a guest on the line.

Keeping it true

One owner, and a rule: whoever changes the thing updates the sentence.

⚠️ Without this it is accurate for four months and quietly wrong thereafter — which is worse than not having it, because now people are confidently giving an outdated answer.

The measurement that shows the cost

Enquiries that end without a booking, by reason.

Most venues do not record enquiries at all, so this is unknown. ⚠️ If even a rough tally is kept for two weeks, "we could not answer" usually appears more often than anyone expects — and it is the cheapest category to eliminate.

The one worth answering best

"Can I request a specific person?"

A guest asking this has already decided to come and is asking how. ⚠️ A vague answer here converts a high-intent enquiry into a maybe, and it is entirely avoidable — the answer is a policy decision that takes five minutes to make and has probably never been made explicitly.

Three to hold

The list of questions actually asked. Produced by the people who take them, not by management.

Enquiries lost to "could not answer." Two weeks of tallying is enough.

Date the answer sheet was last checked. ⚠️ If it is over six months, assume parts of it are wrong.

Where the record has to sit

The answers have to be at the point of contact — the phone, the door, the message. A shared document that requires opening a laptop is not at the point of contact, which is why the guessing continues even in venues that have written everything down.

tasteck keeps pricing, courses, and availability on the same screens used to take a booking, so the common answers are in front of whoever is answering.

They are not difficult questions. They are the same ten questions, and nobody has ever sat down and written the answers.